"The European Commission: Opportunities Seized, Problems Unresolved"

During the years of Jacques Delors' presidencies, and indeed going back to before 1985, the European Commission very successfully played the role of policy entrepreneur. This is not an original assertion, but it has been contested, so in Part 1 of the paper the concept of policy entrepreneur is defined, and evidence is assembled that the Commission did play that role in a number of policy sectors. A distinct strategy is discerned which the Commission pursued. The success of the Commission in acting as a policy entrepreneur extended the scope of integration and of its own competencies. However, as well as provoking something of a backlash post-Maastricht, the success of the Commission in seizing opportunities only added to problems that had been identified much earlier in the history of the Commission and had never been adequately resolved. These problems relate to the managerial and implementation capacities of the Commission. Part 2 of the paper reviews these problems, and some recent solutions that have been proposed to them