New Members in Old Institutions: The Impact of Enlargement on the Committee of the Regions

Abstract

All EU institutions have recently faced the challenge of enlargement, the impact of which has not been limited to a change in the number of officials present or languages utilized. The transformation called into question the capacity of the common institutions to maintain an institutional identity and to absorb new members, integrating them properly into the institutional structures and procedures. The Committee of the Regions (CoR) is distinguished among the EU institutions for the broad range and variety of interests represented, a feature often identified as an obstacle for the smooth and effective work of the institution. In this context, the process of enlargement, which has substantially increased the CoR's membership and made the diversity of interests even broader, inevitably triggers the expectation of a growing degree of conflict in the Committee's internal policy-making process. The working hypothesis here is that enlargement has increased the level of internal conflict in the CoR and contributed to a further split of interests and the creation of new interest groups.

Keywords:

• Committee of the Regions
• enlargement
• European Union
• regional representation
• EU policy-making

Acknowledgement

A first version of this article was presented at the EU-CONSENT workshop, ‘Institutionalising Access: The Committee of the Regions and the European Economic and Social Committee after Enlargement’, Brussels, 14–15 February 2007. The authors would like to thank Mark Gilbert, Simona Piattoni, Nieves Perez-Solorzano, Stijn Smismans and an anonymous referee for their very useful comments. Thanks also go to Vincent Della Sala and Lynn Mastellotto for their linguistic help.

Notes

A more detailed analysis of the way in which the new members vote would be particularly interesting. Unfortunately, the CoR does not register the votes by nationalities.

See Bore's ‘Inauguration Speech as President of the Committee of the Regions – Wednesday 6 February 2002’, and the ‘Speech by Mr. Straub on His Election as President of the Committee of the Regions, Brussels, 11 February 2004’. Both documents are available at http://www.cor.eu.int/en/pres/pres_pre01.html

The notion of cleavage refers to a permanent area of conflict, whereas the notion of divide or lines of conflict refer to a contingent area of conflict.

To this end Christiansen cites the example of local councillors from Wales and Scotland, who would be counted as ‘local members’, even though some of these delegates to the CoR perceive their voice as one for their region/nation rather than for their respective local government (Christiansen, 1995: 40).

Here, we prefer definitions somewhat different from those established by Christiansen (1996: 102), who argued that in the administrative regionalism “the emphasis of regional activity lies in the execution and administration of public policies, sometimes legislated for at higher levels”, and in the deliberative regionalism “the regional institutions are mainly a place for debate and deliberation with only very limited policy-making powers”.

The literature on Europeanization process has looked closely at the linkages between the “logic of consequentialism” and the “logic of appropriateness” with the adaptational pressure. See Boerzel and Risse (2000).