The Commission: The Key to the Constitutional Treaty for Europe

Political inventions are so rare that when they do arise they are not recognized--we try to fit them into traditional classifications, or criticize them for not being something that they were never intended to be. The European Commission (“Commission”) was a genuinely new political invention, created to solve a problem. The problem was that the European Community (“EC”) had to have majority voting. That meant that from time to time minorities would be out-voted.

Majority voting--an old idea, but never before used in an international organization--had to be made acceptable.