This article surveys the roles of the Commission and the Council of the European Community (EC) in the period from early 1991 to spring 1993. It sets these in the context of the unusually crowded agenda of the EC and the debates around the drafting and signing of the Treaty on European Union. It argues that these two institutions that lie at the heart of decision making in the EC suffer from structural problems that remain to be addressed in future discussions of institutional reform.
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References
1.
1. The Council is the European Community organ in which ministers meet to negotiate, to legislate, and to take various decisions. In addition, there exists the European Council, that is, meetings of heads of state and government.
2.
2. Treaty on European Union (Luxembourg: Office of the Official Publications of the European Communities, 1992).
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3. For the previous period, see Helen Wallace, “The Council and the Commission after the Single European Act,” in The State of the European Community, ed. L. Hurwitz and C. Lequesne (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991).
4.
4. See Peter Ludlow, “The Commission,” in The New European Community: Decisionmaking and Institutional Change, ed. Robert O. Keohane and Stanley Hoffman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).
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5. For this and other references to Edinburgh, see European Council, Conclusions of the Presidency, Edinburgh, 12 Dec. 1992.
6.
Wolfgang Wessels , “The European Council and the Council,” in New European Community, ed. Keohane and Hoffman.
7.
For a broader survey, see Christian Engel and Wolfgang Wessels, eds., From Luxembourg to Maastricht: Institutional Change in the European Community after the Single European Act (Bonn: Europa Union Verlag, 1993).
8.
Christian Lequesne , “Quelques considérations sus la pratique du vote au sein du Conseil des ministres des Communautés européennes,”Centre des pouvoirs européens, pp. 19-23 (Autumn 1991).
9.
9. On these points, see the details in European Council, Conclusions of the Presidency.
10.
10. See Les Metcalfe, “After 1992: Can the Commission Manage Europe?”Australian Journal of Public Administration, 51(1):117-130 (Mar. 1992).
