The Commission and the Parliament - The Stuggle for Influence-A game with too many actors. The 2007 enlargement case-study

(Daniela Ionescu , Birmingham University )

The paper starts from the case-study of 2007 Enlargement (Romania and Bulgaria) during which some anomalies occurred regarding the way the Commission and the Parliament monitored the two countries. At the core of this study rests the way the two institutions used the knowledge or the pretense of it under the form of Country Reports in order to gain not only influence during the process of Enlargement but also to support a diversity of lobby influences. The study comes to cover an epistemic gap regarding both the methodology of Commission's Reports and the MP Rapporteurs' Reports. It challenges the image of the Parliament as a human rights and democracy defender since this case shows how the Parliament could be a good venue of cross-lobby interests, from Member States and even the candidate countries till personal interests of powerful MPs, the Rapporteurs. It also questions the ability of Commission's monitoring work, since it was subjected to a double pressure: the Parliament's demands and the Member States' interests. The complexity of Commission's and Parliament's choices and reasons demanded a combination between, what might seem, two opposing theoretical and methodological frameworks: discourse analysis and rational choice institutionalism.