The changes to the European Commission’s structure that were approved yesterday at the first meeting of the new European commissioners are a mixed bunch. José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, has reconfigured some of the departments, ostensibly to make his second term more effective than the first. 

Some of the changes he has made are intelligent and overdue. The splitting up of what was previously the directorate-general for transport and energy is a welcome one. The two made uneasy bed-fellows and their union seemed to ensure that transport was forever the enemy of environment policy.

The decision to transfer competences for state aid in the field of energy and transport to the directorate-general for competition should have been taken a long time ago. If the competition commissioner had been in charge, perhaps tougher decisions on Olympic Airways and Alitalia would have been taken.

Moving responsibility for better regulation from the directorate-general for enterprise to the Commission’s secretariat-general should mean that the dossier receives stronger political impetus in his second mandate. There is no guarantee that efforts to reduce the administrative burdens on business will be more successful in the lifetime of this Commission than in the last. But placing this responsibility in one of the centralised departments sends the right message: reducing the administrative burden of EU law is the responsibility of all Commission departments, not just the one that is supposed to be most sympathetic to business.

The secretariat-general, which reports directly to Barroso himself, has a special power over all other Commission departments. What will be interesting to see during the lifetime of Barroso II is whether commissioners below the level of the president can establish cross-departmental influence. Connie Hedegaard, the commissioner for climate action, has been given a newly created department, albeit a small one. But she has also been given a remit to ensure that tackling climate change is integrated into all areas of EU policymaking, from agriculture and energy to IT and trade.

Similarly Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the commissioner for research and innovation, has been given a cross-departmental brief, in addition to responsibility for the directorate-general for research and the Joint Research Centre.

Bitter experience suggests that those commissioners might struggle to make their influence felt outside their own departments.

The potential for turf wars is greatest in the department for justice, freedom and security. For the most part, in his distribution of portfolios, Barroso has moved away from the idea of having a department respond to more than one commissioner. The carve-outs made when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU and two commissioners were added to the college have disappeared. The department for health and consumers has just one commissioner. Multilingualism has gone back into the embrace of the commissioner for education and culture. The division of the department for transport and energy also ensures that there are not two commissioners in that department.

The glaring exception is justice and home affairs (as the department used to be called) where there is a commissioner for justice (Viviane Reding) and a commissioner for home affairs (Cecilia Malmström). There have already been differences on substance and structure. They disagreed over the SWIFT agreement, and while Reding wanted to take out the parts of the department dealing with civil liberties and fundamental rights to create a separate department, Malmström did not. Barroso agreed to split responsibility for home affairs and civil liberties, partly because it was a key demand of Liberal MEPs and partly because it was seen as a way of restoring the balance between ensuring citizens’ security and protecting basic freedoms, which, critics say, shifted too far towards the security agenda under Barroso I.

The tension between the two commissioners might yet prove a good thing for European citizens, but Reding is a publicity-hungry activist and, as a third-time commissioner, she is capable of elbowing aside the new arrival, Malmström. Barroso must make sure that the balance between security measures and protecting fundamental rights does not get lost in turf battles and power grabs.

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