A purposeful opportunist? The Juncker Commission and EMU reform. Bruges Political Research Papers 72/2018

Sanjurjo Hanck, Pedro León (2018) A purposeful opportunist? The Juncker Commission and EMU reform. Bruges Political Research Papers 72/2018. [Policy Paper]

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Abstract

This paper explores the Juncker Commission’s entrepreneurship when proposing the reform of the Economic and Monetary Union, asking whether the Juncker Commission was more entrepreneurial than the Barroso Commission and, if so, why. Drawing from discursive institutionalism and process tracing, I test the new intergovernmentalist thesis on the ‘decline of the Commission’ with its new supranationalist counterpart. The results show that the Juncker Commission has indeed proceeded in a much more supranationalist way than the Barroso Commission did, as a genuine ‘purposeful opportunist’ when it comes to the reform of the EMU. These changes are not due to structural reasons, as new intergovernmentalists would argue. Instead, it is found here that the causes lie within the process of the presidentialisation of the Commission and the deep pro-European convictions of JeanClaude Juncker. Building from these results, a call is made to introduce (or to further emphasise) presidential agency as a determinant factor in explaining the Commission’s preference formation and to beware of an overreliance on an abstract conception of the Commission. In this sense, it may well be said that the Commission is a ‘s/he’, not an ‘it’.

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