The Commission's supervisory role as the 'conscience of the Union' supports the notion that it represents EU interest on its face, but the reality is different. The Commission can bring those ember states which it considers to have failed to comply with the EU law before the Court of Justice. This seemingly illustrates the idea that whilst the national governments are focused on their own interests, the commission is focused on the compliance and application of EU law, thus representing EU interests. However, as Curtin and Egeberg have argued, a far more synergistic relationship emerges in reality. The responsibility of national administrations for applying, transposing and administering EU law, with Commission responsibility for oversight and co-ordination of the process, leads to an ongoing engagement between the Commission its national counterparts, which revolves more around resolving common interests than around antagonism. This relationship generates a new executive order, which is neither simply European nor simply national.
The European Parliament, initially set up as the European Assembly, does act as the voice of the people of the EU, although citizens of some member states are better represented than others. The seats in the Parliament are not evenly distributed on the basis of population. With the rule stating that no state should receive fewer than 6 MEPs to represent them in the Parliament and that no state may have more than 96, smaller member states are often better represented than larger member states. For instance, Luxembourg, with a population of 400,000 citizens, has one MEP for roughly every 65,500 citizens, whilst Germany, with a population of 82 million, has one MEP for around every 828,000 citizens. Thus it may be a fair approximation to say that though the Parliament does represent the people of the EU, the weighting is biased towards smaller member states, which perhaps conjures the notion that the Parliament represents the people of those smaller member states, more so than it does the people of EU.
Internally, it has been said that voting behaviour within the European Parliament is less cohesive than in national parliaments. Given that there are no European political parties and that MEPs are elected as representatives of national political parties, concerns about both the representative and deliberative capacities of the Parliament can be evoked. As Weiler notes, concerns about the former lie in the idea that a representative democracy depends upon the collective sense of 'us' to represent. Without this common sense of 'us,' it is argued that there is no reason for losers of any vote to accept the view of the majority, for they don't see themselves as a part of a common political community with whose decision they must comply. Concerns about the deliberative capacities of the Parliament stem from the political parties and the media being organised mostly along national lines. This prevents a debate which is plural and transparent, and inhibits citizens' involvement in the activities of the European Parliament, which runs contrary to the argument that the European Parliament represents the voice of the people of the EU.
The Council of Ministers, along with the European Council, is the institution that represents national governments. The different types of voting represent the ways in which this is done. With simple majority vote wherein each member of the council gets one vote (14 are required for a measure to be adopted) is seemingly biased again towards the smaller member states and is thus used in only a few areas, mostly procedural ones. QMV, a weighted system of voting (under which each member state is allocated a number of votes according to their population) is often said to be a fairer portrayal of national interests. It is thus used more often and for more important issues, such as those to do with human rights. However, given that each member state is likely to have a singular stance on any given issue, perhaps the national governments' interests are best represented through simple majority vote. For instance, even though Germany might be issued 29 votes, it is unlikely that they would split those votes as the polls have indicated within their state. If 60% of the citizens opposed and the rest supported the proposed legislation, per say, the German MEP would cast all 29 of its votes on 'nay' as opposed to correctly representing the population and casting 17 votes on 'no' and the rest on 'yes.' Thus it maybe suggested that although the system of voting within the council does represent national governments with relative success, it may be better and a fairer representation if more emphasis was given to simple majority voting.
In essence, the Commission, the Parliament and the Council all fulfil their agendas successfully with little deviations from those stated goals of the treaties. However, given the reality and the fact that these are man-made rules and fairly new (some powers have only been granted to the institutions since the Lisbon Treaty) it would be impractical to assume that the commission represents none but the EU interests, the Parliament represents none but the people of the EU and the Council none but the national governments. At this stage of integration whereby the pluralistic style of governance creates a dualistic relationship between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism whereby neither one is perceived as superior to the other, we can safely say that elements of both are present in all of the EU institutions.
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T. Christiansen, 'Tensions of European Governance: Politicised Bureaucracy and Multiple Accountability in the European Commission' (1997), 82
D. Curtin and M. Egeberg, 'Tradition and Innovation: Europe's Accumulated Executive Order' (2008), 649
J. Weiler, 'Does Europe need a Constitution? Reflections of Demos, Telos and the German Maastricht Decision' (1995), 225