ABSTRACT
This contribution takes its assigned task seriously. It deals with the most Kafkaesque among the very many European institutional developments, namely the committee system. This system, or comitology, would readily seem to represent-and indeed was early qualified as such2-the bureaucratic challenge par excellence: the administrative incubus, which is steadily superseding more conventional structures of democratic governance (cf. Weiler 1999b). However, this widely held view, may still, and will be contrasted as against a far more optimistic view.
