Cette notice résume nos connaissances sur les plus de 1000 membres qui se sont succédé au Comité économique et social européen depuis 1958.This short paper sums up what we know about the more than 1,000 persons who have held seats in the European Social and Economic Committee since 1958

Lemercier, Claire

SPIRE - Sciences Po Institutional REpository

Members of the Economic and Social Committee
In 2013, Henri Malosse became the thirtieth president of the European Economic and Social Committee
(EESC), probably the least famous among European institutions. He is not the first president to seek ways to
promote a committee that he describes as “too well-behaved, too conformist, too private” and that he would want
to become more “proactive” instead of being content with an advisory role. Since the Rome Treaty, the EESC
has been given the right to initiate its own reports, but more importantly, it has also been confronted with new
institutions providing competing venues for representation, for negotiation between socio-economic interests and
for  lobbying.  The  direct  election  of  the  European  Parliament  since  1979  has  offered  it  more  democratic
legitimacy, while members of the EESC are still chosen by governments. These members represent both their
Member State and organizations that generally work at the national (sometimes regional, rarely European or
international) level. Most of them speak for rather widely defined interests, e.g. those of employees or small and
medium enterprises  (SMEs),  unlike more focused lobbying groups.  In  addition, EESC customs promote the
search  for  consensus:  most  reports  are  passed  unanimously.  This  tendency  has  rapidly  led  employers’
organizations, especially UNICE/BusinessEurope, to stay away from the institution. The European Trade Union
Organization (ETUC) is more present in that EESC members representing trade unions generally vote according
to ETUC positions, but the EESC is certainly not key to ETUC strategies.
 However, the EESC is still there and more than 1,000 persons have held a seat since 1958. Not only is
it  still  there,  but  in  many respects,  it  looks  unchanged.  From the  very  beginning,  it  has  been  customarily
organized around three groups: employers, workers and “various interests”. The list of organizations represented
for each country has seldom changed, and the same is true for the career profiles of members, which are also
remarkably similar from country to country. Because of these enduring characteristics, the EESC has contributed
to the perpetuation  of a  European  standard of  legitimacy for  interest  groups and their  representatives.  This
standard that gives a prominent place to the representation of workers and employers (and, among the others, of
farmers and SMEs) is firmly rooted in the 1950s. The standard profiles of EESC members are produced by the
preferences of governments, which tend to choose their national partner organizations, and of people who accept
or do not accept their nomination. Being a member is indeed not an easy task; although some choose to report
more than others, all have to be present in Brussels, which often takes a quarter or half of their time.
Who are and who have been the members of the EESC? Despite attendance requirements, Brussels is
rarely their main place of work. Henri Malosse is an exception in this respect. A member since 1995, he reported
on dozens of diverse topics and speaks several foreign languages; he has never owned a firm, but began his
career as an intern in the European Commission, then worked for chambers of commerce and represented them
in the EESC. On the contrary, for most members, holding a seat in the EESC merely represents a European stint
in the context of a national career of interest representation. Only a small minority of members have been in
charge of European or international issues in their previous positions before being appointed. Such experience is
however more frequently found among representatives  of workers  (who also include more women, scarcely
present  in the rest  of the membership).  Andrzej Adamczyk,  a current  member appointed as the head of the
Foreign Affairs office at Solidarność, exemplifies this profile.
Why do members devote a few years to the EESC (the four or five years of one term of office for half
of them, but up to twenty years  for some)? They use it  to test new ideas or mottos, or to hear  about those
produced in other organizations and by the European institutions. They also have more personal career strategies
– or retirement strategies, as half of the members are over 60 years old when appointed, and a third more than 70
years old when leaving office. One sixth of the members have an individual seat in the EESC, in the sense that
they do not represent any organization. The vast majority of these members has always come from the British
delegation – the only one that significantly differs from all the others, and whose members do not seem to weigh
much in the EESC. They are university professors, former members of Parliament, consultants or directors of
firms;  for  example,  current  members  Bryan  Cassidy and Rose  D'Sa  are  presented  respectively as  a  former
member of the European Parliament and a consultant in international, European and Commonwealth law.
Conversely, the other (non-British) delegations include many representatives of national confederations
of workers, such as Solidarność, and employers/firms. These organizations generally choose one of their vice-
presidents or permanent staffers as members of the EESC. The latter are picked by trade unions, and, since the
1990s, by all organizations. It  is however for other types of organizations that the EESC appears as a focal
European institution: those that represent agriculture, transport, the SMEs and professions. They have always
held many seats in all delegations, benefitting from the possibility to become either members of the Employers’
Group  or  of  the  Various  Interests’  groups.  Their  seats  have  also  been  given,  more  often  than  in  other
organizations,  to  national  presidents  –  who  also  often  were  members  of  national  Economic  and  Social
Committees and active in chambers of agriculture, commerce or trade. Among this third type of EESC members,
we  consistently  find  very  young  French  farmers  who  then  climbed  the  hierarchical  ladder  in  the  national
agricultural federation and sometimes pursued a political career: Joseph Daul became a member of the EESC at
33, in 1980, then ended up in the European Parliament. However, the EESC was more often one of the last
representative positions held in a long career, after becoming the president of a national organization, sometimes
during or before a term of office in a European or worldwide interest group. For example, René Bernasconi, the
president of the French general confederation of SMEs, represented it in the EESC from 1982 to 1990, from the
age  of  66  to  74,  then  joined  the  direction  of  the  European  Association of  Craft,  Small  and  Medium-sized
Enterprises.
What happened to these well-established profiles after the enlargement of the European Union in 2003?
Since the 1990s, the EESC presidency as well as European treaties have put forward a new vision of “civil
society”, more focused on non governmental organizations (NGOs) rather than on workers and employers. Did it
impact the new delegations more than the others? In Romania, for example, explicit directives were given to
represent  the  interests  of  women,  disabled  persons,  or  the defense  of  the  environment,  as  well  as  farmers,
employers or workers. These directives, however, have had little aggregate impact, partly due to the small size of
each  delegation  (the EESC still  only has 344 members).  Seats are  still  given  to the interests  that  are  most
strongly organized at the national level. Even in the Romanian delegation, only a third of the current members
represent NGOs, and among the 29 members currently representing farmers, 10 were chosen by recent members
of the EU. In practice, many NGOs are reluctant to recognize the role of the EESC as a forum for civil society,
due to this enduring domination of socio-economic organizations. Neither new discourses nor the enlargement of
the EU have had much impact on the EESC, which remains a little-known organization. For its members, it still
represents  an opportunity for  European  socialization, in that  they learn  about the Brussels  bureaucracy and
observe  delegations  from  other  countries.  Overall,  this  has  contributed  to  the  persistence,  and  even  the
propagation to new countries, of a model of interest representation and discussion among interests that had been
invented in the mid-twentieth century.
Bibliography
BERNARD, N., LAVAL, C. et NYS, A., Le Comité économique et social, Bruxelles, éditions de l'Université
de Bruxelles, 1972
CESE, Le Comité économique et social européen, 1958-2008 : 50 ans de démocratie participative, Bruxelles,
CESE, 2008.
EISELE,  G.,  “Worte  und  Taten:  Der  Europäische  Wirtschafts-  und  Sozialausschuss  als  Forum  der
organisierten Zivilgesellschaft”, Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, 2008, pp. 29-41
GUICHET, C.,  Le comité économique et social européen. Une organisation capable de s’imposer dans la
gouvernance européenne ?, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013.
LEMERCIER, C., « Les organisations patronales et la représentation institutionnelle des intérêts au CESE »,
in MICHEL, H. (dir.), Représenter le patronat européen. Formes d'organisation patronale et modes d'action
européenne, Bruxelles, P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 209-247.
VAN DER VOORT, W. J., In Search of a Role. The Economic and Social Committee in European Decision
Making, thèse de science politique, Université d'Utrecht, 1997.
SIDJANSKI,  D.  et  CONDOMINES,  J.,  « Le  profil  du  Comité  économique  et  social  des  Communautés
européennes en 1982-1983 », Revue d'intégration européenne, 1983.
SMISMANS,  S.,  “The European  Economic  and Social  Committee:  towards  deliberative  democracy  via  a
functional assembly”, European Integration online Papers, 2000.
Index of notions: SME, representation of interests, civil society, unions
Index of names: Adamszyk, Andrzej; Bernasconi, René; Cassidy, Bryan; Daul, Joseph; D'Sa, Rose; Malosse,
Henri
Renvois à d’autres notices : BusinessEurope, European corporate elites, NGOs, ETUC, Farmers, Lobbyists,
Unionists
Legal references: 
Rome Treaty, articles 193-198, modified with the same numbers by the Maastricht Treaty; 
Nice Treaty, articles 257-262; 
Lisbon Treaty, article 256 bis; Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, article 300.
Websites:
Official EESC websites: http://www.eesc.europa.eu/


Economic and Social Committee (Members)

This short paper sums up what we know about the more than 1,000 persons who have held seats in the European Social and Economic Committee since 1958.Cette notice résume nos connaissances sur les plus de 1000 membres qui se sont succédé au Comité économique et social européen depuis 1958

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Archive Ouverte en Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication

Archive Ouverte a LUniversite Lyon 2

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Economic and Social Committee (Members)

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