Holding Executive Power to Account: The EU Administration’s Accountability Challenge(s)

Abstract

The of t-heard complaint that Brussels-based bureaucrats exercise extensive executive powers with no accountability is one of the critical issues in debates about EU governance. The EU administration is characterized either as a ‘leviathan’ or as a set of unelected ‘eurocrats’. As a leviathan, it is depicted as ‘a monolithic and virtually uncontrollable force eating away at personal liberties and economic resources’ (Peters, 2010, 266). As eurocrats, they are stereotyped as a set of zealous bureaucrats bound with red tape and rule books, who forge useless interventionist policies ‘such as the size of strawberry or the curve of a banana’ (Curtin, 2009, 104). These opinions of the Brussels bureaucracy, by politicians and academic commentators, suggest that the rapid growth in the reach and influence of EU governance arrangements is unchecked and uncontrolled. It qualifies EU governance as relatively unaccountable.