Civil Servants Circled By Foes: Misunderstood at the Helm of the EU

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/an-inside-look-at-the-european-commission-a-969129.html



The highly qualified civil servants at the EU Commission wield tremendous power, but their frequent lack of political savvy has turned many Europeans against them. SPIEGEL profiles the EU's executive in advance of the European election.

Civil Servants Circled By Foes: Misunderstood at the Helm of the EU
By Christoph Pauly and Gregor Peter Schmitz
May 15, 2014 – 02:59 PM

It's barely nine hours into the new working week, and the European idea is, at least figuratively, already in need of a new bailout package. A handful of officials sit at a square table in the office of the European Commission's chief spokesman, discussing the fact that the press, as usual, hasn't been very friendly in recent days.

~snip~

Afterwards, the civil servants disperse into their honeycomb-like offices, where alerts constantly tell them when something critical about "Brussels" pops up in Google News.

An Indefinable Mishmash

This is just a glimpse into the everyday schizophrenia at the European Union's Brussels central nervous system. The Commission's 33,000-plus employees are overseen from Berlaymont, a 13-story high, flashy building in the heart of Brussels' European District. The European Commission is an enormously powerful institution, but it is a strength that its workers try their best not to flaunt. The halls here are, instead, permeated by the fear that it could lose its power.

The Commission is an indefinable mishmash of government and public agency -- one that conducts foreign policy like a foreign ministry and regulates competition in the manner one would expect from a national cartel office. Most of the policies and directives that are ultimately applied in national law in European Union member states originate with the European Commission. And because the Commission has responsibility for monitoring adherence to European law, it also has the ability to levy billions of euros in fines. These punitive measures can be applied against Internet companies like Google or Microsoft if they go afoul of EU competition rules, but also against a state like Germany if the Commission finds it has violated regulations by, for example, providing an illegal state-funded bailout of a company like carmaker Opel, whose days appeared to be numbered several years ago when its US parent company General Motors hit the worst of its crisis.

The Commission is a highly attractive place to work: For every position it fills, it receives hundreds of job applications from across the Continent. If a high-flying 27-year-old lands a job there, then it is not unusual for him or her to be negotiating issues relating directly to the interests of a powerful CEO or government leader -- a phenomenon more typical of a place like elite global consulting firm McKinsey. If they succeed in working their way up to the highest staff positions in the Commission, civil servants in Brussels can even manage to take home more pay each year than a German chancellor -- largely due to higher allowances and lower taxes.