One commissioner per country is an error EU will regret

Another Irish referendum is a reminder of past mistakes.

Before Ireland embarks on yet another referendum about a European treaty, it is worth pondering the damaging after-effects of earlier votes. The European Council was so desperate to see the Lisbon treaty ratified, and so spooked by Ireland’s ‘No’ vote in 2008, that it made an important concession to Ireland on the composition of the European Commission.

The Lisbon treaty provides that from 2014 – in other words, from the next European Commission – the number of European commissioners should be two-thirds of the number of member states. That change should be welcomed because the current college is grossly over-sized. The number of commissioners stands at 27 (one per member state) and will grow to 28 when Croatia joins the EU in July 2013. That is too unwieldy for effective discussion and decision-making – yet another reason why the president dominates Commission business.

But the promised reduction in the number of commissioners is most unlikely to happen – it has been wrecked by that Irish referendum of 2008. The European Council, at meetings in December 2008 and June 2009, promised that the Lisbon treaty would be changed so as to guarantee one commissioner per member state. Some form of legal decision will be needed to effect this change – and so far no proposal has been published. But a proposal has been prepared in the secretariat of the Council of Ministers and must see the light of day soon if it is to take effect before the formation of the next college begins.

Established practice is that the formation of the college begins immediately after the European Parliament elections (June 2014), because it is the new Parliament that will consider – and vote on – the person nominated by the European Council to be the next president of the Commission.

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But the formation of the college will probably begin earlier, because there is much talk of the European political parties putting forward, during their election campaign for the European Parliament, candidates for the presidency of the Commission. For some, this is a way to make the Parliament more interesting to voters (who might otherwise be non-voters). For some, it is the logical extension of the Parliament’s power to vote on a Commission president.

José Manuel Barroso, the current president, warned this week against the “over-politicisation” of the Commission. Pascal Lamy, a former commissioner, speaking this week at the think-tank Bruegel, was more enthusiastic about direct elections for the Commission president, though he suggested that some of the Commission’s regulatory functions – competition commissioner, for instance – would have to be separated out, to ensure the appearance of independence.

What the current discussions omit – for fear of offending the Irish, perhaps – is that this ‘politicisation’ discussion makes no sense if a defining characteristic of the Commission is that it is composed of one commissioner from each member state. The Commission should not be an ‘inter-governmental’ institution, in the way that the European Council is. Instead, the commissioners should be, as the treaties put it, “persons whose independence is beyond doubt” and should “neither seek nor take instructions from any government or other institution, body, office or entity”. The Commission’s task is to identify and defend the common European interest.

The (painful) negotiations over the Lisbon treaty had worked out a way of reducing the size of the college and rotating the participation of member states in nominating its membership. The European Council was wrong to retreat from that position and to make a concession to Ireland on this point.

However, the damage is difficult to undo. The argument for a reduced college is an insiders’ argument – about efficacy, about the nuances of balance between different EU institutions. Outside Brussels or Strasbourg, those arguments will not play strongly against the crude simplicity of “Our country [insert as appropriate] must have its own European commissioner”. The pass has been sold.

Still, before the Irish vote again, it makes sense to admit the errors of 2008.