Brussels rethinks the Commission ahead of a larger Union

The European Commission has put forward a proposal that touches the institutional architecture of the Union: abandoning the rule whereby each member state is entitled to its own commissioner, and reducing the cases in which decisions require unanimity among governments. This is reported by Euronews Italia, which at the moment appears to be the only available source on this initiative; there is no independent confirmation of the details of the proposal.

The issue the Commission says it wants to address is the prospective growth of the Union, which with the ongoing enlargement processes could come to count 30 or more member states. With a college of commissioners that grows in step with the number of countries, managing portfolios and ensuring policy coherence becomes more complex: a college of thirty or more members poses organizational problems different from those of a college of twenty-seven.

Likewise, unanimity — currently required in sensitive areas such as foreign policy or taxation — becomes statistically harder to achieve the more the number of governments that must reach a common agreement grows. A single opposing country can block a decision, and with more states the risk of deadlock increases.

Based on the sole available source, it is not clear what alternative mechanisms are being proposed in place of unanimity, nor how the principle of national representation in the Commission would be redistributed. These are questions that directly affect the balance of power between large and small states within the Union, and that would require changes to the treaties — a process that has historically required the consent of all member states, the same mechanism that the proposal would partly aim to overcome.

The proposal comes as several Western Balkan countries and other candidates continue their path toward European Union membership, a process that has long raised the question of how to adapt institutions designed for a smaller number of members to an expanding Union.