POLITICS VERSUS SCIENCE: APPORTIONING ... - Buffalo State

of reliance of harmonization as the implementing process for the attainment of the Single
Economic Market (SEM), with the Commission’s White Paper (1985), the Milan Council
Summit of that year, and the 1987 Council decision clarifying comitology (Nugent 2003,
136) we see the regulatory committee (comitology) [139] increasingly recognized as
having a more important role to play in policy implementation. 7
Two basic views of comitology have emerged in the literature, each a direct result
of the question posed. If the overriding concern is "democracy" and "transparency,"
comitology is often vilified as undemocratic, unrepresentative, non-transparent, and
unaccountable. Wessels (1997, 38) writes: “The extent of legitimacy is after all an
empirical issue: how far do those represented accept the decisions prepared, taken, and
implemented in the EU policy cycle?” Weiler (quoted in St. Clair Bradley 1999, 76)
describes comitology as “a phenomenon which requires its very own science which no
single person has mastered.” Chambers (1999, 100) refers to comitology as “the Council
in the Commission,” part of the “constitutional fudge which glues the Union together by
filling the fundamental gulf between federalism and intergovernmental co-operation. Like
fudge,” she tells us, “it doesn’t make a very stable glue when the temperature rises. If
instead, one seeks to balance supranationalism and federalism, comitology is a practical
way to accommodate this balance. Falling between mutual trust (harmonization) and
independent agencies, the comitology system or deliberative supranationalism (Joerges
and Neyer 1997) is, “a conceptual alternative of the well-known dichotomies between
7 Nugent (2003, 137-138): advisory committees can only advise the Commission; management committees
can block Commission decisions by QMV; regulatory committees must give their approval for
Commission decisions by QMV. It is important to note that comitology did exist prior to the SEA,
especially in the form of a complex agricultural comitology, which successfully combined the national and
supranational.
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