State Aid, its Claims and the Question of Representation

In one of her interviews in 2017, when talking about the Apple state aid case in Ireland, Margrethe Vestager, the Competition Commissioner stated: “We are doing this because people are angry about tax avoidance and the [European] council knew that it already had the power to do something to change that. The thinking was: ‘Let’s try to do something different within the system we have. Something that means no change to legislation or voting systems, but a change in attitude that acknowledges that people across Europe are angry” (Margrethe Vestager in Writes 2017). In this way, Vestager was claiming to act in the interest of the people, thus becoming their representative. In the same context, the Irish government defined the case as an “encroachment of EU state aid rules into Ireland’s sovereignty around taxation” (Brennan 2017), stating that “it is necessary to defend the integrity of our tax system and provide tax certainty to business” (Brennan 2017). Against this background, this paper takes the Apple state aid case as a prime example to analyse how the European Commission (more specifically the DG-Competition) uses state aid cases to legitimise and frame itself as a representative of EU citizens. More specifically, it traces: a) how the state aid became politicised, b) the claims used by the different actors to legitimise or delegitimise the Commission’s actions and lastly, c) how the EU is trying to connect and represent Irish citizens through these state aid cases. The politicisation of this case will be analysed using a claims-making analysis, which evaluates the claims that political actors make in order to represent certain policy preferences, constituencies or values (Saward 2006), and to legitimise their actions.