キャビネの変化に見る欧州委員会の透明性

―構成員，活動倫理，情報公開の分析から―

抄録

　This article discusses the problems regarding the commissioners' cabinets and the series of reform the Commission has implemented to address them. The analysis examines the rules and agreements governing the composition of the cabinets, the members' professional ethics, and information disclosure on contacts and communications with the EU institutions. The article argues the implication on the Commission's transparency in the discussion on legitimacy of the EU by identifying the features, backgrounds, and significance of the transformation of the cabinet system.

　The cabinet system was introduced in the ECSC Commission under the influence of French administrative culture. Cabinets were expected to lubricate the horizontal and vertical relations between the commissioners and the DGs. However, in the early days, cabinets used to be composed of member states bureaucrats of the same nationality as the Commissioner and had been criticized as national enclaves. The internal process in the cabinets in those days was not transparent, but its black box simultaneously extracted the compromises from the member states and played an effective coordinative function.

　Based on the recognition that such a cabinet system introduced an intergovernmental dynamism inside the community institution, the Commission was driven to establish new rules for its reform. The Prodi Commission set a series of internal rules governing the number of cabinets' members, code of conducts, nationalities, and the status of retired members. Succeeding Commissions strengthened the rules on nationality and grades of officials, thereby denationalizing the cabinet system and optimizing the internal working of the Commission. However, this change made a cabinets system unable to foster citizens trust toward the EU. Consequently, the Junker Commission and the Von der Leyen Commission set new rules and agreements disclosing the information on the cabinets' meetings with groups and individuals outside the Commission, which successfully enhanced its transparency.

　Transparency is an integral part of throughput legitimacy and of accountability, but its role and significance are highly depending on the features of the organization. The article concludes that the chronological gap between the commencement of organizational denationalization and the expansion of information disclosure does not mean that the Commission was too late to initiate the reform, but that the Commission properly addressed the problems pursuant to the features of the cabinets in the community institutions in each phase of European Integration.