Tous les mois sur euradio, Lola Avril, docteure en science politique et chargée de cours à Sciences Po, discute avec un·e chercheur·se en sciences sociales pour comprendre, à partir de ses travaux, les élections européennes et les enjeux de la campagne électorale.
Bonjour et bienvenue dans Parlons Commission, les institutions européennes en questions. Je suis Lola Avril et tous les mois nous discuterons avec des chercheuses et chercheurs en sciences sociales du fonctionnement de la Commission européenne et de sa place dans le processus décisionnel. Pour ce septième épisode, j'ai le plaisir de rencontrer Hussein Kassim, professeur de science politique à l’université de Warwick. Il a dirigé plusieurs projet de recherche autour du personnel de la Commission européenne et il répond, en anglais, à mes questions sur le parcours de ce personnel, ses représentations mais aussi sur la présidentialisation de l’organisation interne de la Commission.
Hello Professor Kassim, thank you for accepting this invitation. You coordinated and were part of several collective projects, such as the European Commission in Question in 2008, the European Commission Facing the Future in 2014, and on the Juncker Commission in 2019. What were the objectives of these projects?
Well, let me go back to the start, there are lots of myths about the Commission that you find in the academic literature, but also in the public discourse. And what we wanted to do is to just to go out and find whether these myths were held true or not.
We were also really aware, I mean especially if you go back to when the project started in 2016, that the empirical literature that existed at the time was based on the examination of very small strata of the Commission.
And so we were keen to ask ourselves :”well, okay we know that Directors General believe this, but what about the whole organisation, what about the different staff categories, what about people who don't necessarily work in the Berlaymont building, do they think the same thing?”.
We knew that it would require the co-operation of the institution and fortunately in my academic life I'd come across the then Secretary General Catherine Day so I was able to propose the idea to her and fortunately she was receptive as was Commission President Barroso, which really made the difference.
And of course, a project of this scope and scale does require a lot of people, and whenever I say we in presentations, I show the picture of the team as it was in the field at particular moments, and there are sort of 10 or 12 of us.
It's important just to be able to design a survey to carry out the interviews, because all of our projects combined an online survey communicated to all members of staff, then about a programme of 200 interviews and then focus groups. That requires people.
It also requires different skills and expertise and I was really delighted that we were able to put together teams that brought together specialists of public administration, public management, high-level sort of methods people : Andy Thompson, Sarah Connolly, Renaud Dehousse, Michele Bauer, and Brigid Laffan.
The other thing I'd say is … you asked what it was we were trying to find out. So the myths are about several things, they're about who these people are, they're about what they believe, they're about their experience. Because you know one of the myths is that these are people who just live in the Brussels bubble, that's all they know, they might move from university straight to Brussels, we wanted to find out whether that was the case. And there's also other kinds of myths which look relatively innocent when you say them : like the Commission is populated by lawyers - which turn out when you scrutinise them to be intended rather more negatively.
You've taken a close interest in the Commission staff, who are we talking about?
So we're basically talking about the 30 000 people who work in the organisation and we're talking about all staff categories, so from the administrators, the policy officers that people usually talk about in the pre-clinic language, these are staff category A, but also the other categories of staff because we were sort of curious about how that worked.
Actually it was a Commission official who said to me : “one of the issues with our organisation is that people talk about officials, they talk about permanent officials, but look how much work is done by contract agents, people who are in the Commission”. You meet people within the organisation who have temporary contracts but have been there for many, many years.
So on the one hand, the formal categories are really important because they shape people's careers and possibilities, but on the other hand, if you were only to look at A-officials, permanent officials, you would get a very distorted view of the organisation.
And on the background of these civil servants, you were saying that research has tended to present them as lawyers, having studied law, having a legal background. Does your research confirm this belief?
Absolutely not at all! There were some really interesting findings, and I still have a strange pleasure and delight in discussing them.
One of those, for example, is that fully 97% of people in the organisation have experience working elsewhere before they moved into the Commission. That's extraordinary. And it's not 97% who've done, like I did, worked for the post office over Christmas or whatever. It's people who have worked between four and six years somewhere else. So this is a genuine experience. So that really contradicts the view of the commission as a bubble.
With respect to civil servants, it was a surprise to us that there was at least as many graduates of economics and business as there were of lawyers. And actually, given I'm a professor of politics, roughly speaking, more politics and international students than, or graduates of those subjects, than anyone else. So not a commission of lawyers at all.
And I think that the general point is that what we discovered is that there's a far greater diversity of background, educational and professional, and of experience, that people outside the commission believed.
And another widespread view about the civil servants and this Commission staff in general is that they chose the Commission because they support the European project, that they would be all federalists. You said that you looked at the representations, at the beliefs of the staff. What were the results of your survey with regard to their beliefs?
Well, we looked at this question really hard and approached it in a variety of different ways. I mean, essentially, we were interested in what Commission officials believe, because obviously the depiction outside the organisation is that they're zealous federalists. And so, you know, we looked at their motivations, why they moved to Brussels. Was it the desire for international experience or was it to build Europe or was it, you know, bluntly speaking, competitive remuneration?
And we also asked about different conceptions of EU governance that they preferred. Would you prefer the EU to be intergovernmental or supranational? And, you know, of course, most people wanted it to be supranational, but there were very, there is a distribution that it's worth looking at that sort of contradicts the idea that this is, you know, resolutely a kind of, you know, federal army, if you like.
It's not at all like that.
Another focus of your research is on the organisation, internal organisation of the commission, and especially on the presidentialisation of this Commission. First, what exactly is the role of the presidency, and what do we mean by presidentialisation?
The original model was, you know, created by Hallstein as the first Commission president, intended at making the Commission very thoroughly collegial.
So that meant that the commissioners who were then appointed, their portfolios were allocated by the member states, collectively. The Commission president had very little power, in fact the powers of the president were sort of scarcely differentiated from those of other members of the Commission.
And, you know, I don't think it's widely appreciated quite how far collegiality spread.
And what really struck us is how this was changing. And there is a trajectory of transformation, and it does begin with Barroso I, although you could make a case that there were formal powers that were introduced following the Amsterdam Treaty that Romani Prodi could have made more use of, but did not for various reasons.
And, you know, Barroso was very explicit before he became Commission president in 2004, you know, a Commission of this size, an organisation facing enlargement, it has to have a single boss.
And he was very clear that the boss would be him. And he reorganised the Commission, by which I mean he reorganised the secretary general, in a way so as to provide the administrative resource that the Commission president would need to ensure that his priorities were implemented by the organisation.
So I'd say now that the role of Commission presidents can be changed, there's a series of treaty changes that empower the Commission, but it was that real change by Barroso, and then a later step by Juncker. Juncker taking the specific mandate, interpreting it in a way which gave him the sense that the programme on which he had campaigned should become the programme of the Commission, his priorities should become the programme of the Commission, and he needed to design the Commission in such a way that it would be able to deliver that programme.
And I would argue that Ursula von der Leyen took up that model.
And what about now? Von der Leyen has started a second term of office, does her renewal confirm this trend towards a more presidential style of government?
Yes, and something that I'm working on, the long book out of all of this is a book on presidentialisation and presidentialism, and the point is that there was a process of presidentialisation, but there are different models of presidentialism, and what we see is an increasing personalisation.
You saw that a lot with von der Leyen I. Some of it you could argue was kind of contingent, you know, having to face the crises and actually rising to the challenge of those crises. Others have more to do with the personal style a strongly personal decision-making.
And I think now that if you look at the structure of the Commission, the structure of the von der Leyen II College, you see very clear evidence of a centralisation of power.
In a way you could argue that power's been concentrated for a while, but I don't think it's had the sort of level of personalisation and personal intervention made by the Commission president before the current president.
