The European Commission and Dissensus over Liberal Democracy

As guardian of the EU treaties, the European Commission has a key role to play in order to uphold the rule of law, and therefore also finds itself at the forefront when it comes to dissensus over liberal democracy in the Union. The Commission, in order to protect core European values as enshrined in Article 2 TEU, has a number of instruments at its disposal, ranging from soft law such as the rule of law framework and annual reports to binding and indeed punitive sanctions such as infringement procedures, the general regime of conditionality, and the budgetary horizontal enabling conditions. Against this background, the chapter examines the internal and inter-institutional tensions surrounding the Commission’s role in responding to encroachments on liberal democracy. The chapter starts with a review of the Commission’s formal powers pursuant to the EU treaties, its composition and role in the EU’s polity and the mechanisms established to ensure the institution’s internal cohesion, before proceeding to compare and contrast the Commission’s role with respect to two specific crises confronted by the EU over the past decade: the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone and the Rule of Law crisis. The chapter concludes that while the Commission’s principled commitment to the values of liberal democracy remains deeply entrenched, there is a significant degree of ambivalence in the manner in which such principles are applied in the context of specific challenges where policy action by the Commission is required.