The European Commission and EMU reform: from constraining to empowering politicisation?

Research on the politicisation of the European Union has focused mostly on the constraining effects of issue-level politicisation and how supranational institutions react to it. However, politicisation can potentially also empower supranational institutions by enhancing, rather than constraining, their capacity to pursue their own goals. In this paper we theorize this complementary avenue of politicisation, and show how the European Commission has made use of the politicisation of EMU reform and ensuing member-state divisions to promote a reform agenda aimed at widening its margins for discretionary action. We use a mixed-methods approach combining process-tracing, an expert survey, and a hand-coded dataset of Commission recommendations, to show how the Commission progressively reinterpreted its role. As politicisation intensified, it proposed centralising solutions at each negotiating round, and – when successful – made use of its extended powers as a genuinely political, and politically responsive, actor.