Introduction
According to the treaties, members of the European Commission, the European Union's (EU) principal supranational bureaucracy, are entirely independent in their decisions and do not take instructions from their native country, parties, or from any other group. In reality, however, it does make a difference whether a Finn or a Frenchman heads a division, even if the treaty says otherwise. This became most obvious when the looming accession of new member states to the EU led to calls to reduce the Commission's size by having the member states relinquish their right to nominate a commissioner. Small member states, in particular, insisted fiercely on retaining ‘their’ commissioner. This phenomenon is not limited to the EU. As I shall illustrate, other international organizations also exhibit informal spheres of control in the sense that different divisions within an international bureaucracy unofficially ‘belong’ to a state or a group of like-minded countries. I henceforth refer to these spheres as ‘national fiefdoms’.
Although empirical studies sometimes mention the existence of subcultures within different parts of an international organization (see, e.g., Cini Reference Cini2000), models of delegation have paid scant attention to the phenomenon of national fiefdoms. Its neglect can be said to be inherent to the popular principal-agent model, according to which states delegate the authority to implement a legalized agreement to an international organization. According to this model, the act of delegation constitutes the international organization as a unitary actor in interaction with the member states, its principals. Although it expects states to use control mechanisms in order to keep the international organization in check, this model does not envisage that the organization be controlled from inside. That would be considered an institutional pathology.
In contrast, I contend that national fiefdoms are neither pathologies, nor should they be ignored. They arise systematically and are important for understanding how international organizations work day-to-day. This article presents a transaction cost-based theory of national fiefdoms in international organizations. Its central argument is that national fiefdoms result from the implicit exchange of administrative control among governments. Drawing on distributional theories of legislative organization, it is based on the assumption that the diversity of interests among states holds potential gains from the exchange of political support across issues. These theories argue that because legislators may renege on delivering their quid pro quo, they enforce these exchanges by granting one another agenda control over their preferred jurisdiction. The same logic applies to the control of international organizations tasked with the implementation of multiple policies. If states are more politically vulnerable to a loss of control in one policy than in another, they gain from supporting one another in controlling the international organization in the implementation of its various objectives. To render these exchanges durable, states grant one another informal control over those bureaucratic divisions that implement their most preferred policy. As a result, international organizations exhibit mutually tolerated informal spheres of national control, or ‘national fiefdoms’.
This theory of national fiefdoms in international organizations has important implications for the literature on delegation and international organization. First, the theory suggests that states may have more control of their international organizations than prominent models of delegation suggest (similarly, Stone Reference Stone2009, 48). In fact, some authors (reviewed below) argue that the diversity of preferences among states makes it difficult to make effective use of control mechanisms and, thus, to control the international organization. In contrast, the argument about gains from the exchange of control implies that in the presence of multiple policies, diverse preferences may in fact even strengthen states’ informal grip on their agent.Footnote 1
Second, the article points to a blind spot in models of delegation that consider international bureaucracies (agent) as a unitary actor with invariably strong preferences for more autonomy from the member states (principals).Footnote 2 Similarly, prominent models of legislative bargaining and implementation in the EU typically model the Commission as a unitary actor with invariably strong preferences for deep levels of integration (see, e.g., Garrett and Tsebelis Reference Garrett and Tsebelis1996, 280). In contrast, I argue that the agent's unitary character and consistent preferences are empirical questions that cannot be imputed to an international organization (similarly, Hörl et al. Reference Hörl, Warntjen and Wonka2005). Politics and bureaucracy interact in more complex ways.
Third, the article contributes to a growing body of literature on informal governance within international organizations. Prominent studies in this research agenda attribute this phenomenon to power asymmetries among member states (Stone Reference Stone2011, chap. 2; Marcoux and Urpelainen Reference Marcoux and Urpelainen2013; see, however, Kleine Reference Kleine2013a), arguing, for example, that informal governance allows powerful states to circumvent the formal procedures when they consider their important interests to be at stake. In contrast, this article presents a transaction cost-based argument for the existence of informal governance, which it attributes to the need to render implicit exchanges of control more durable.
Although informal governance might be the norm rather than the exception in international organizations (McKeown Reference McKeown2009, 288), it receives less attention than politics within official procedures. This is probably not least because of the difficulty of tracing informal practices empirically. The study of national fiefdoms is no exception in that regard. This article consequently confines itself to an illustration of the theory's plausibility using the case of the European Commission – arguably the world's most powerful international bureaucracy. Drawing on documents from national and EU archives, commentaries from practitioners as well as secondary analyses of appointments and recruitments, I find that this supranational bureaucracy indeed exhibits divisions that are informally dominated by one or a group of like-minded member states, and that these fiefdoms matter for the Commission's actions. Corroborating the theory, the evidence suggests that member states tolerate one another's control over divisions that are tasked with the implementation of policies that lie close to their heart.
The article is structured as follows. The following section reviews theories of delegation and bureaucratic drift in international organizations. The second section then presents a theoretical argument for why and under what circumstances we should expect international organizations to exhibit informal spheres of national control. Using the example of the college of commissioners and their cabinets in the EU, the subsequent section probes the theory's plausibility. I conclude by discussing the applicability of this theory beyond the case of the EU, illustrating the existence of informal spheres of national control in other international organizations, and recapitulating the study's theoretical and substantive implications.
Delegation and agency in international politics
International organizations can be defined as formal entities that have states as members and possess a permanent secretariat, bureaucracy or some other form of permanent administration (Pevehouse et al. Reference Pevehouse, Nordstrom and Warnke2004, 103). Although international bureaucracies are constitutive for international organizations (which is why I henceforth use both terms interchangeably), students of international organization have only recently begun to study them in a systematic fashion. This section is a brief review of how the increasing prominence of principal-agent models has revived scholarly interest in the interaction between states and international bureaucracies. This literature suggests that, even though the diversity of interests and bargaining power among states need not prevent delegation, it does impede the effective control of an international organization in its daily operation.
From bureaucracies to regimes and back
In the post-war era, it was a central concern for scholars to explore whether the new international organizations such as the World Bank or the United Nations (UN) would be able to support the political and economic reconstruction effort. Against the background of the intellectual divide between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’, who were optimistic or pessimistic in this respect, the focus of research was typically on the politics within international organizations to identify the conditions under which international bureaucracies triumphed over nation states’ realpolitikal reflex.
International organizations fell off the radar of International Relation scholars in the 1970s when they realized that many situations in international politics are characterized not by discord or harmony (as the divide between idealists and realists suggested), but by a combination of mutual dependence and conflict. Accordingly, attention shifted from the question of whether states cooperate to the conditions under which states cooperate and accept being constrained by a regime's ‘norms, principles, rules and procedures’.Footnote 3 This new focus gradually demoted the study of international organizations proper. ‘Prior to the study of international regimes’, Martin and Simmons (Reference Martin and Simmons1998, 737) explain:
an inquiry into the effects of international institutions meant inquiring into how effectively a particular agency performed its job… When regime analysts looked for effects, these were understood to be outcomes influenced by a constellation of rules rather than tasks performed by a collective international agency.
International organizations resumed center stage when instead of falling apart, as realist scholars had predicted, they became increasingly prominent as the end of the East-West conflict opened up new opportunities to shape the global order. However, the proliferation and increasing significance of international organizations from the 1990s onwards also raised concerns in public and academic debates about their accountability. Since these discussions resembled debates in American Politics about ‘runaway’ bureaucracies, it was not long until scholars introduced principal-agent approaches to the study of international organization.Footnote 4
Models of delegation in international politics
In the generic principal-agent model, the delegation of authority entails two choices. First, states decide whether to pursue their interests unilaterally or in cooperation with other states. If they opt for cooperation, states (as the principals) jointly decide whether to delegate the authority to implement their common objectives to an international organization (agent). The benefits of delegation may be manifold. International organizations interpret ambiguous rules, take the blame for unpopular policies, or centralize policy-relevant expertise (Hawkins et al. Reference Hawkins, Lake, Nielson and Tierney2006, 13–20). Once set up, however, there is the risk that the bureaucracy slacks off, develops different views about what it should do, and consequently exploits its autonomy against the member states’ best interests.Footnote 5 Accordingly, the literature explores under what circumstances states choose to delegate authority to an international organization, and how they subsequently manage to control international bureaucrats.
In answering these questions, students of delegation pay special attention to the fact that, in contrast to the workplace, the principal is, in fact, composed of multiple member states with different interests and bargaining power.Footnote 6 Leslie Johns (Reference Johns2007, 247; see also Voeten Reference Voeten2001), for example, explores the effect of asymmetric interests and bargaining power among the member states on the design of delegation. She argues that small states accommodate larger states with viable options to pursue their interests outside the international organization by delegating authority to an international bureaucrat who is biased in favor of the more powerful state.Footnote 7 Randall Stone (Reference Stone2011) explores the effects of power asymmetry on the informal politics within international organizations. Because their preferences might be time-inconsistent, he argues that powerful states with viable outside options face difficulties committing credibly to long-term cooperation through international organizations. In exchange for favorable formal voting rights in normal times, however, small states accept that the dominant power temporarily assumes informal control of the organization when urgent strategic objectives override its interests in the organization's long-term objectives.Footnote 8
Whereas the bulk of the literature shows that states accommodate differences in power and interests in the design of a delegation contract,Footnote 9 scholars are more skeptical about the capacity of states with diverse interests to control international bureaucracies in their daily operation. To be sure, there is wide agreement that states do anticipate control problems and consequently limit the risk that bureaucracies run wild by designing mechanisms that align incentives and reduce informational asymmetries between both principal and agent. A distinction is typically drawn between police–patrol mechanisms such as annual hearings and justification of agendas that are supposed to prevent agents from shirking, and fire-alarm mechanisms, such as investigations into fraud allegations, that are initiated when the agent is suspected of having abused its power (McCubbins and Schwartz Reference McCubbins and Schwartz1984; see also McCubbins et al. Reference McCubbins, Noll and Weingast1987; McCubbins et al. Reference McCubbins, Noll and Weingast1989).Footnote 10 No design is perfect, however, and so some agency slack is to be expected in every delegation relationship. The propensity for this bureaucratic drift in the daily operation of an international organization is, therefore, an empirical question that depends on the design of control mechanisms and the credibility of the principal's threat to invoke them (Pollack Reference Pollack1997, 129).
If agency slack is a function of control mechanisms and the principal's capacity to invoke them, some contend that this propensity for agency slack might be especially high in international politics when the principal is composed of many states with diverse preferences and bargaining power (see, however, Lake and McCubbins Reference Lake and McCubbins2006, 361–362). Drawing on the literature on delegation and bureaucratic drift in American politics (McCubbins et al. Reference McCubbins, Noll and Weingast1987, 248–252; Reference McCubbins, Noll and Weingast1989, 439; Kiewiet and McCubbins Reference Kiewiet and McCubbins1991, 34), the argument goes that heterogeneous preferences among states impede their capacity to take collective decisions and, therefore, to recontract their international organization in the event of agency slack (see, e.g., Hawkins and Jacoby Reference Hawkins and Jacoby2006, 212). As Nielson and Tierney (Reference Nielson and Tierney2003, 249) express it:
If actors within the collective principal do not agree on proposed policy changes or institutional reforms, and the agent is cognizant of this disagreement, then the agent may be able to play members of the collective principal against each other. Such a situation makes it difficult for the collective principal to alter, or credibly threaten to alter, the agent's contract. Hence, agents can more easily ignore threats and refuse to modify their behavior.Footnote 11
This holds true even when majority voting facilitates decision making. Lisa Martin (Reference Martin2006, 144) observes:
When state preferences diverge, stretching along the entire policy continuum, there is more likely to be a wide range of proposals that could gain majority approval. This gives the staff [of an international organization] room for maneuver, as they can choose the proposal within this space that comes closest to their ideal point.
In sum, the literature on delegation in international politics emphasizes that, although differences in states’ interests and power may not impede delegation, they do impede effective control of an international organization and, ceteris paribus, enhance the propensity for agency slack. In contrast, the following section argues that the diversity of preferences among states may, under certain circumstances, strengthen their informal grip on the international organization.
A theory of national fiefdoms within international organizations
Prominent models of delegation argue that diverging preferences among the principals impede effective control and increase the propensity for agency slack. This problem might be particularly acute in international politics where the principal is always composed of various member states with diverging preferences and bargaining power. However, extending this model by allowing for the international organization to be tasked with the implementation of various policies turns these claims on their head. This section argues that multiple policies open up opportunities for gains from exchanging support for the control of parts of an international organization. States render these exchanges durable by granting one another informal spheres of national control, or national fiefdoms, over their most preferred divisions within the international organization.
Gains from exchange of control
The finding that diverse preferences among principals impede the effective control of an agent stands in contrast to results in political economy about the gains from political exchange. This work on vote trading, also known as logrolling, stipulates that divergent interests create implicit or explicit markets for the trading of political support (Buchanan and Tullock Reference Buchanan and Tullock1962; Tullock Reference Tullock1981). Consider a legislature deliberating on a single issue. Absent any contact with one another, each legislator begins by submitting a proposal that benefits him at the expense of others, but none of these proposals commands a stable majority. However, by supporting an issue that one legislator cares less about in exchange for support on another issue that is closer to his heart, all legislators get their proposal passed and, as a result, are better off.
This formal result about the gains from political exchange implies that divergent preferences among the principals need not impede the control of an agent. In fact, the divergence of preferences creates potential gains from exchange of political support for the control of a section with an international organization. Consider the following hypothetical situation where state A strongly opposes the international organization's excessive liberalization of public companies, but somewhat supports its consumer protection policy. State B, however, is highly vulnerable to the organization's overly activist consumer protection policy, and lukewarm about the liberalization of public companies. In this situation, both states would benefit from supporting each other and curb the international organization's activism in both cases.
The industrial organization of international bureaucracies
Yet gains from an exchange like this are difficult to realize. Enforcement problems arise because states do not reap their gains at the same time. Public perception of the issue may change, and the electoral effect of this change is observable only to the government it affects. This induces a form of moral hazard in that one party to the bargain may claim that it can no longer help control the international organization and so attempt to renege. In the face of this commitment problem, states can be expected to devise institutional arrangements that sustain exchanges of political support.
Distributional theories of legislative organization show that this can be accomplished by assigning property rights over political jurisdictions. Starting from the observation that Congress exhibits a large set of rules that give committees substantial power over legislative outputs, Ken Shepsle and Barry Weingast, among others, argue that these committees serve to enforce deals among legislators that would otherwise be subject to cheating and reneging (Shepsle and Weingast Reference Shepsle and Weingast1987; Weingast and Marshall Reference Weingast and Marshall1988). Laver and Shepsle (Reference Laver and Shepsle1990, 875–878; Reference Laver and Shepsle1996) apply this distributive logic to the organization of coalition governments, arguing that the allocation of government portfolios among the participants in the coalition determines whether a coalition government can credibly claim to remain stable.
This same distributional logic applies to the control of agents, even though the good that is being exchanged is different. Both distributional theories of legislative organization and the theory of national fiefdoms argue that the allocation of property rights over jurisdictions enforces agreements among political actors. In the former case, however, legislators exchange influence on substantive policy outcomes, whereas in the latter case states exchange control of an international organization tasked with the implementation of various policies. Each state consequently monitors a bureaucratic division in order to prevent its drift, and they intervene in the division's daily work if it fails to live up to its responsibilities.
Consider the exchange of control in the absence of property rights over certain jurisdictions. State B announces that it supports state A's demand that the bureaucracy curb (increase) its activism in the liberalization of public companies. In exchange for this support, state A announces its support for state B's demand for a less (more) aggressive consumer protection policy. After having restrained the bureaucracy's activist (sluggish) implementation of the consumer protection policy, state B's administration is replaced with a new government that in spite of its predecessor's promise fails to support A in limiting the bureaucracy's aggressive (sluggish) liberalization of public companies. In short, states face problems committing credibly to the exchange of control due to their incentive to overturn the substance of a deal through subsequent political action.
Now consider the same bargain assuming that states have some control of the international bureaucracy's actions.Footnote 12 State A builds a national fiefdom within the division responsible for the implementation of an agreement about the liberalization of public companies, and state B has some political clout in the division responsible for consumer protection. Suppose that, once state B has received support for limiting (promoting) an aggressive implementation of consumer protection, its new government no longer supports state A's demand for a less (more) activist liberalization of state-owned companies. Since the division responsible for liberalization is part of state A's fiefdom, however, state B cannot prevent state A from exerting control over the bureaucracy's implementing actions in this policy. The institutionalization of national fiefdoms within the international organization serves as a mechanism to prevent ex post reneging in the exchange of control over aspects of this organization's responsibilities (Weingast and Marshall Reference Weingast and Marshall1988, 144). Thus, all states are better off tolerating one another's informal control of their favorite aspects of an international organization than in a situation where the diversity of their interests impedes the collective control of their agent.
To be sure, national fiefdoms need not be entirely informal. It is not unusual for states to appoint representatives to the political level of an international bureaucracy. What remains informal, however, is the understanding that senior positions go to a country that is vulnerable to agency slack in certain jurisdictions, and, accordingly, states tolerate this country's interference into the bureaucracy's daily operation. Just as there is no official rule in Congress that says who is allowed into which committee, there is no need to formalize an understanding about the composition of an international organization's political level. Furthermore, the informality of this arrangement affords states the flexibility to adapt the allocation of national fiefdoms in the face of long-term changes in the international organization's scope or membership (Abbott and Snidal Reference Abbott and Snidal2000, 445) as well as to exogenous shocks to its operation (Kleine Reference Kleine2013a, 22).
In short, gains from exchanges exist due to the fact that states place different values on the extent to which they wish to control an international organization across various policy areas. To reap these gains, states grant one another control in those policy areas where they are most vulnerable to bureaucratic drift. Against this backdrop, the theory implies, everything else being equal, that states can be expected to establish spheres of influences over those subdivisions that they intensely prefer.Footnote 13
Alternative perspective: national fiefdoms as information suppliers
The distributional model of legislative organization has not remained without critics. Informational theories of legislative organization postulate that legislators do not know the precise relationship between the instruments they select and the outcomes subsequently produced (Gilligan and Krehbiel Reference Gilligan and Krehbiel1990, 536; Krehbiel Reference Krehbiel1991). To close this gap, legislatures are organized in a way to provide incentives for legislators who invest in becoming experts in a field. An empirical implication of this theory is that committees tend to be heterogeneous, since the diversity of interests promotes informational efficiency (Gilligan and Krehbiel Reference Gilligan and Krehbiel1989, 463).
It can be argued that the gap between the centralized implementing actions and policy outcomes on the ground is especially high in international politics where international organizations operate at a good distance from their member states. Informational theories would consequently predict that its various divisions supply international organizations with information about implementation obstacles on the ground. For that purpose, and in contrast to distributional models, informational theories expect divisions within an international organization to be composed heterogeneously of actors with different interests regarding the appropriate level of control.
National fiefdoms in the EU
This section examines the EU's principal supranational bureaucracy, the European Commission, in order to illustrate that it exhibits national fiefdoms that are controlled by countries with strong preferences in a given subject area. The EU offers a good context to test the theory's plausibility, since it comprises various policies that offer plenty of opportunities for gains from such an exchange. The subsequent section discusses to what extent this section's findings are generalizable beyond the European context, and it provides further examples of national fiefdoms in other international organizations.
First, however, we have to specify how to determine the existence of national fiefdoms within a supranational bureaucracy. For that purpose, I begin by contrasting the Commission's official set-up with actual recruitment and decision-making practices. I define national fiefdoms as divisions where there is a preferable recruitment of co-nationals at the senior level, and where this senior staff monitor and rein in the bureaucracy's daily operation. Against this backdrop, I evaluate the theory's empirical implication that preference outliers control these national fiefdoms – that is, member states build informal fiefdoms in those divisions within the Commission that implement their most preferred policies.
The following analysis draws on new primary sources from national and EU archives,Footnote 14 other primary sources as well as excellent secondary analyses of the Commission. Especially useful for our purposes are two excellent studies, namely Wonka's (Reference Wonka2008) analysis of the Commission's recruitment and internal decision-making practices as well as Thomson's (Reference Thomson2008) work on the influence of commissioners on policy outcomes.
The European Commission as an independent agent
Like other international organizations, the EU is based on several legalized interstate agreements that spell out the objectives and rules of cooperation. These agreements concern first and foremost the establishment of a genuine single market, in which trade among the member states is as easy as trade within them. ‘Flanking’ the single market are policies such as monetary union, competition, common commercial policy, environmental regulation, and consumer protection. Finally, the EU has more limited competences in, for example, security policy, immigration, and police cooperation.
The EU institutions implement the legal agreements among its member states through the following stylized decision-making process: the Commission sets the agenda by submitting a proposal for a legislative act. After official submission, governments in the Council of Ministers either adopt the legal act, jointly with the European Parliament, by majority vote, or they amend it unanimously. The European Commission, national administrations, or both, typically implement this legal act. The European Court of Justice, in cooperation with domestic courts, enforces compliance with EU law.
The European Commission is, therefore, the EU's principal bureaucracy that helps the member states formulate and implement their legalized agreements. In that respect, its primary responsibilities include (1) proposing and developing policies and legislation; (2) executive functions, including secondary legislation and supervision of member state policy implementation; and (3) guarding the legal framework by monitoring compliance with EU law (Nugent Reference Nugent2010, 122–133).
Students of the EU usually explain the delegation of these powers to the Commission with the vocabulary of principal-agent theory (Pollack Reference Pollack2003). Since international cooperation generates benefits as well as adjustment costs for different domestic groups, governments might suddenly face incentives to give in to the demand of certain domestic interests to renege on an interstate agreement. To enhance the credibility of their commitment to cooperation, they consequently delegate the authority to formulate and implement their agreements to an agent that is shielded from these ad-hoc influences (Majone Reference Majone1994; Moravcsik Reference Moravcsik1998). Because they are more removed from domestic interests, so the argument goes, supranational institutions are more immune to ad-hoc influences than national administrations (Hawkins et al. Reference Hawkins, Lake, Nielson and Tierney2006, 18–19).
Since the delegation of authority to the Commission is supposed to enhance the credibility of the member states’ commitments, EU treaties put strong emphasis on this agent's independence. The Treaty on European Union (Article 17) states:
In carrying out its responsibilities, the Commission shall be completely independent. [The] members of the Commission shall neither seek nor take instructions from any Government or other institution, body, office or entity. They shall refrain from any action incompatible with their duties or the performance of their tasks.
Consequently, the treaties emphasize that the Commission's internal decision-making processes be shielded from ad-hoc influences. The Commission's administrative level, the ‘services’, is composed of various subdivisions called Directorates-General (DGs). The Commission's political level is composed of the president and a college of commissioners whose members are nominated by the member states.Footnote 15 Each commissioner is responsible for a specific portfolio and, therefore, a number of DGs. The Treaty on European Union (Article 17) stipulates, ‘[the] members of the Commission shall be chosen on the ground of their general competence and European commitment from persons whose independence is beyond doubt… [They] shall refrain from any action incompatible with their duties’. The Treaty on the Functioning of the Union (Article 245) emphasizes that ‘Member States shall respect their [the commissioners’] independence and shall not seek to influence them in the performance of their tasks’.
A number of control mechanisms are supposed to prevent the Commission from systematically overstepping its discretion. For example, various governmental committees (comitology) and other supranational institutions such as the European Parliament and the Court of Auditors monitor the Commission's behavior. The European Court of Justice reviews the legality of its actions, which it may declare void, and may also rule on the Commission's failure to act on its responsibilities under the treaties (Pollack Reference Pollack1997, 114–116).
The Commission in reality
The EU's formal rules suggest a principal–agent relationship between the member states and the Commission. The member states deliberately delegated the authority to implement their legalized agreements to this supranational bureaucracy. Fully aware of their temptation to manipulate their agent, they officially pledged to guarantee its complete independence from national and other ad-hoc influences. A number of external control mechanisms hinder the Commission from overstepping its powers.
In practice, however, the Commission was never able to assert its independence in full. Immediately after the Commission had been set up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the commissioners established personal offices, the original function of which was to prepare decisions in the college of commissioners (Krenzler Reference Krenzler1974). But these offices, the cabinets, quickly assumed additional tasks. Composed mainly of fellow countrymen, they served as a transmission belt between the commissioner and her home country, and the member states themselves did not shy away from using these ties to raise objections against legislative proposals in the making. For example, in an internal meeting of undersecretaries in the late 1960s, the German economics ministry observed that other countries made much better use of ‘their’ commissioners, and urged that it was necessary to follow suit in order to be able to voice specific concerns about Commission initiatives (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft 1967).
Cabinets permitted the commissioner, to whom they were directly responsible, to intervene on behalf of her home country in the work of the Commission services (Coombes Reference Coombes1970, 255). Describing the development of ‘national enclaves’ within the Commission, a close observer noted in 1964 a strong ‘discrepancy between institutional theory of the Communities… and the administrative practice of the Commission’ (Siotis Reference Siotis1964, 249). Fearing this degradation of the Commission's supranational character and the collaboration between college and civil servants, its first president Walter Hallstein was keen to keep the cabinets’ size as small as possible. A member of the Hallstein Commission explains:
The President [Hallstein] was categorically opposed to the numerous cabinets: he said he did not want the commissioners to become ‘mediatized’ by their immediate collaborators. Beyond doubt, he also considered that because everyone seemed to quietly agree that cabinet members ought to be of the same nationality as the commissioner, their excessive multiplication risked creating an internal nationalism within the cabinet (Lemaignen Reference Lemaignen1964, 49–50).
Nevertheless, the commissioners found various ways to work around the president's order. The size and influence of the cabinets consequently grew considerably from an average of four in the late 1960s to 14 members by the mid-1970s (Poullet and Deprez Reference Poullet and Deprez1976, 53; Michelmann Reference Michelmann1978, 495), and increasingly became a channel for the member states to raise objections against proposals in the making, and for the commissioners to subsequently intervene in the work of the services (European Communities 1979, 56).
Although the presidency of Jacques Delors from 1985 until 1995 is often hailed as the second heyday of the Commission, these years only served to enhance the power of the cabinets and intensify frictions between the college and the services. For Delors, his personal office was a means to circumvent internal decision making, and the members of his cabinet, headed by Pascal Lamy, were considered particularly patronizing, even brutal, toward other commissioners and the services (Ross Reference Ross1994, 63–68). To retain control over their portfolios, other commissioners reacted by strengthening their own cabinets’ power over the services under their jurisdiction. An internal report in 1991 notes an ever-increasing interference by commissioners and cabinets into the work and tasks for which the services are responsible (Commission des Communautés Européennes 1991, 4). Another internal report drawn up by the services themselves points to the cabinets’ increasing meddling with each directorate general's work, and demands ‘first of all, to improve the connection [embrayage] between the institution's political and the administrative level, and in this context to limit the excessive interference of the member states (Commission Européenne 1994, 36)’.
The system of cabinets came under fire when various incidents of mismanagement and nepotism under Delors’ and, subsequently, Jacques Santer's presidency put the Commission under increased public scrutiny (Commission Européenne 1994, chap. 2; 1998). The Commission's services set up a task force and the European Parliament a Committee of Independent Experts to inquire into the cause of the Commission's mismanagement. The report criticized that cabinets are ‘composed exclusively or predominantly of persons of the same nationality as the commissioner’ and consequently demanded clearer rules and criteria for the appointment of individuals to the cabinets as well as limits on the cabinets’ size and quotas to ensure their multinational character (Committee of Independent Experts 1999, 23). A former member of one of these cabinets describes their role as gatekeepers and transmission belts:
[A] member of cabinet has to be a kind of internal spy. To do this job, he has to know what is going on in the DG – and this is not always straightforward… As soon as a draft reaches the political level – in other words, the level of cabinets – national interests come more strongly into play. During my studies, I had been taught that a commissioner works for the greater good of all Europeans. Like many things taught at school, this is not entirely true… [All] too often national preoccupations are introduced into the debate via the backdoor of the commissioner's cabinet (Eppink Reference Eppink2007, 115–116, 119).
There have been a number of attempts on the part of Commission presidents or the services to reform the cabinet system. Under Commission President Romano Prodi, each cabinet was supposed to include staff of at least three nationalities with no more than six senior members (Agence Europe 1999; European Union 1999). His successor Barroso decreed that at least three members had to be recruited from the services (Egeberg and Heskestad Reference Egeberg and Heskestad2010, 780; Peterson Reference Peterson2010, 2, 5). The effort to denationalize cabinets to some extent seems to have been a reaction to the cabinets’ increasing abuse of their control over the services that in several cases also took the form of excessive corruption. In the conclusion, I will return to the issue of how member states ensure that fiefdoms continue to serve the collective interest.
Importantly, the hiring and strategic use of co-nationals is not mere patronage. Statistical evidence confirms that national fiefdoms have real influence on their division's policy. In an analysis of 70 legislative proposals introduced by the Commission between 1996 and 2000, Robert Thomson (Reference Thomson2008, 187) finds that the nationality of the responsible commissioner has a substantial effect on the Commission's position vis-à-vis the member states. In other words, it shifts the Commission's position closer to that of the commissioner's home country and farther away from other member states’ positions. This finding suggests that, once appointed, commissioners are not entirely insulated from national pressures and, in fact, build national fiefdoms to control their division's policy.
The distribution of posts in the Commission
Why do member states tolerate one another's control of divisions within the Commission? I argue that the member states realize gains from the exchange of political support for the control of the Commission's implementing actions in their most preferred policy. Accordingly, we would expect that preference outliers control national fiefdoms.
The most recent comprehensive study of the Commission is Wonka's (Reference Wonka2008) work on Commission appointments since 1958, in which he shows that instead of nominating individuals that are most devoted to the ‘European cause’, the member states typically send people to Brussels that seem easier to control. In the context of this study, Wonka also marshals impressive evidence to show that member states strategically secure for ‘their commissioner’ portfolios of policies that they intensely prefer. For example, left-wing governments predominantly appoint commissioners to head those divisions in the Commission that deal with the negative externalities of the single market such as consumer protection, environment, and social policy. Similar examples exist for country-specific preferences. Countries that share a border with membership candidates have always occupied the division responsible for EU enlargement. Countries such as Germany and Great Britain that are ‘net contributors’ strongly dominate the directorate general responsible for the budget in order to prevent lavish spending (Wonka Reference Wonka2008, 121–130).
The member states’ influence penetrates the Commission's administrative level as well. As Michelle Cini observes (Cini Reference Cini1996, 126), some portfolios and their respective DGs more or less ‘belong’ to certain member states. Consider the EU's controversial agricultural policy. Most of the time since the establishment of this policy, a person with a conservative background or from a country with a strong agricultural sector, such as The Netherlands or Italy, assumed the position of Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development. Importantly, for 42 out of the 50 years of the policy's existence, a Frenchman occupied the highest posts (director general) in this DG (personal communication with DG Agri, 2 July 2013). There is strong evidence that these appointments were politically motivated on the part of France in order to shape the development of this policy (Seidel Reference Seidel2009, 295). As a result, French has always been the dominant working language in this DG, and so to advance in this DG it was necessary for civil servants to have a proper command of that language. Similar evidence exists for other DGs as well. Germans seem to have a legacy claim on the highest post in DG Competition, while the Italians have, for a long time, occupied the highest position in DG Economic and Financial affairs (Page Reference Page1997, 54). Every now and then, this system is mixed up by the accession of a new member state and the addition of new policies to the EU. For example, after its accession in 1986, Spain began to occupy the position of Director General of DG Regional Policy.
Summing up, the evidence presented in this section suggests that member states grant one another informal control within the European Commission. As demonstrated with the description of the cabinet system, these national fiefdoms have the capacity to influence the administrative level in its daily operation, and the member states do not shy away from using this influence to control the services’ work in their favor. Corroborating the theory, but contradicting informational theories, the evidence suggests that commissioners tend to head national fiefdoms in policy areas in which their home country holds intense preferences.
National fiefdoms outside the EU
One might object that this case selection overestimates the theory's plausibility, since the EU's broad scope of policies offers more opportunities for exchange than any other international organization. One can also make the argument that the EU constitutes a hard case for the theory, since the Commission is more autonomous and, therefore, better able to fight off influence on its services’ work than many other international bureaucracies.
Indeed, a cursory look at appointments and recruitment in international organizations illustrates that tacit deals among governments in terms of controlling different aspects of an international organization's output are not limited to the EU. The most prominent example of such an implicit exchange of control is perhaps the understanding between the United States and the EU that a European national chair the International Monetary Fund, whereas an American citizen heads the World Bank. But there are other, more subtle examples.
Consider the UN. The Secretariat, staffed by international civil servants, carries out a myriad of duties ranging from the administration of peacekeeping operations to making studies about different countries’ economic and social trends. According to the Charter, the Secretariat is entirely independent and, to avoid any national clustering, recruited on a wide geographical basis (Jonah Reference Jonah2008, 166). In reality, there is ‘a continuing disparity between the formal or legal code of conduct and the operational code’ in recruitment to the UN (Meron Reference Meron1981, 910). Recruitment of senior staff is guided by an informal agreement among the permanent members of the Security Council that emerged in the midst of the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union agreed ‘to ask’ the Secretary-General that a national of each be appointed as Assistant Secretary-General. The other members, France, Britain, and China, also staked their respective claims to positions at the highest administrative level (Ziring et al. Reference Ziring, Riggs and Plano2000, 117–118). Nationals of the same country or a certain group of countries usually inherit these posts (Meron Reference Meron1981–1982, 862).
As the number of top Secretariat positions (Under and Assistant Secretaries-General) increased, the practices of preserving such appointments was extended to other governments, leading to what a close observer called ‘national monopolies on senior posts’ that resulted in a ‘fiefdom mentality’ (Rivlin Reference Rivlin1993, 9) and ‘national preserves’ (Meron Reference Meron1977, 93–98) over certain top-level posts in the Secretariat. As two close observer note:
[Under- and Assistant Secretaries-General] posts have become associated with certain nationalities, or regional or language groups, and although there may be ‘trades’ affecting which nationality or group is represented in which post, the overall balance within the upper levels is likely to change only slowly. (Finger and Mugno, quoted in Ameri Reference Ameri1996, 250).
There is some evidence that preference outliers, rather than neutral individuals, head the UN's programs and commissions. To give but a few examples: Germany seems to call dibs on the Director General of the UN Environmental Program, while Chinese diplomats appear to have a seat reserved at the head of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which monitors and assists countries in achieving important social and economic development goals.
Similar evidence exists for Nato where member states traditionally monopolized strategic posts. As Hylke Dijkstra (Reference Dijkstra2013, 11) notes, Germany occupies Political Affairs, since this division deals with a country of special interest to Germany, namely Russia. Interestingly, a classified document from the US State Department mentions the existence of so-called ‘legacy positions’ within Nato. Discussing the pros and cons of institutional reform, it insists that ‘even if we were to abandon legacy positions in general’, the United States should retain the position of Director of Nato's Office of Security (NOS): ‘The [U.S. government's] and the [intelligence community's] ability to influence the work of NOS would be significantly constrained without a highly cleared U.S. official in the director position’ (US State Department 2009).
However, there is variation in the prevalence of informal spheres of national control insofar that the World Trade Organization (WTO) appears to have developed implicit norms against the trading of control of its Secretariat's divisions. The WTO rests on agreements that cover, among other things, market access, subsidies, anti-dumping, agriculture, intellectual property rights, trade and environment, and technical trade barriers. Its Secretariat, which comprises sixteen divisions that are supposed to engage in helping the members monitor compliance with the existing agreements, is supposed to be the guardian of the treaties and to assist and support WTO members within the framework of this mission.
The lack of specific appointment procedures and official national quotas that constrain recruitment for posts within the WTO Secretariat should facilitate the trading of control through national fiefdoms. In fact, there is more sensitivity for an appropriate regional balance at the top level as well as an understanding that the United States and the EU, as the two most influential members, will always have one Deputy Director-General. However, according to two close observers of the WTO, there is ‘a tacit agreement that no one chairs a committee on a subject on which his country has strong interests; thus Australia and Switzerland would not want, or be asked, to chair a committee on agriculture’ (Yi-chon and Weller Reference Yi-chon and Weller2004, 257–259).
What might account for the variation in international organizations’ propensity to develop national fiefdoms? A first, simple reason would be that some international bureaucracies such as the WTO Secretariat have a relatively low discretion in the implementation of policies to begin with. In this sense, states lose little from agency slack and gain little from exchanging control. Among international organizations that do enjoy discretion, the theory expects the scope of an international organization in relation to the diversity of interests among member states to determine the development of national fiefdoms. In other words, a broader scope (as in the EU and the UN) provides plenty opportunities for the exchange of control within one international organization, whereas a relatively narrower scope (as in the WTO) offers fewer such opportunities.
Conclusion
The last decade has witnessed an increasing popularity of principal–agent approaches to international organizations. In this view, states (the principals) delegate the implementation of a legalized agreement to an international organization (the agent). The conventional wisdom about states’ capacity to control international organizations is that heterogeneous interests among the member states impede control and consequently enhance the agent's autonomy, whereas homogeneity allows for effective control and limited autonomy.
Contrary to this conventional wisdom, this article argues that conflicts among states need not impede effective control. In fact, in the presence of multiple policies, there are gains from the exchange of control over a bureaucracy. To reap these gains, states grant one another control over their most preferred divisions within the international organization. As a result, international organizations exhibit informal spheres of national control, or national fiefdoms. The article demonstrated the theory's plausibility using the example of the EU. Additionally, the cursory review of appointments and recruitment in other international organizations demonstrates that this phenomenon is by no means limited to the European case, and that there is variation in the extent that international organizations exhibit national fiefdoms.
The findings of this article consequently point to a blind spot in principal–agent models that construct international organizations as unitary actors in interaction with their principals. However, if we acknowledge that the principal is not a unitary actor and, instead, consists of various states with diverse preferences, it is only a small step toward arguing that international organizations, too, cannot always be conceived of as unitary actors with invariably strong preferences for autonomy from the member states. Its preferences and behavior are, in fact, empirical questions that cannot be imputed to an international organization. Against this background, this article suggests that states with heterogeneous preferences may have more control over international organizations than current models and anecdotes about runaway bureaucracies suggest.
Are national fiefdoms good news or bad news for cooperation? Considering how the European Commission's cabinet system seems to have gotten out of control during the presidency of Jacques Delors, one may wonder what prevents fiefdoms from abusing their control to the detriment of the collective interest? The literature on coalition government is instructive in that regard. To prevent coalition partners from abusing their control of individual ministries, member parties allot one another junior ministers, or they enhance parliamentary scrutiny in order to keep tab on the actions of other cabinet members (Thies Reference Thies2001, 582; Martin and Vanberg Reference Martin and Vanberg2004, 15–16). States have similar means to ‘control the controller’. As we have seen, although they are still dominated by certain nationalities, cabinets in the EU are now required to comprise several nationalities other than the commissioner's. Future research could investigate what other means states use in order to keep a check on one another's informal control (see, e.g., Kleine Reference Kleine2013b).
Thus, national fiefdoms are not mere pathologies, but should be considered an instance of informal governance. However, where prominent theories of informal governance attribute informal national control of an international organization to power asymmetry among member states, this article presents a transaction cost-based argument for the existence of this phenomenon. To be sure, power and exchange are not mutually exclusive concepts. Since the number and value of the ‘goods’ (i.e. divisions) to be distributed might be scarce, states will bargain and fight over the precise distribution of national fiefdoms among them. In this fight, powerful states can be expected to get the plum portfolios, while smaller and weaker member states settle for the dregs. However, large states’ pursuit of power is not the reason why national fiefdoms exist (Stone Reference Stone2011). They exist because they solve the commitment problem that states face in the exchange of political support for the control of their international organization.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Leo Baccini, Jeff Frieden, Lloyd Gruber, Tom Hale, Sara Hobolt, Hartmut Lenz, Will Phelan, Waltraud Schelkle, Ken Shepsle, Achim Wehner, three anonymous reviewers, and the editors for very thoughtful comments on the first version of this article. The author also thanks Abby Heller for excellent editorial assistance.
