ABSTRACT
The history of European integration is very much the history of the European Commission. The ups and downs of the integration path have clearly been reflected in the activity of the Commission. This chapter looks at the European Commission and its context in the 1990s requires some attention to concepts and terminology. Institutions are significant in mediating the demands of the structural environment with the day to day running of policy-making by individual decision-makers. The chapter examines a number of tensions which the Commission had to internalise and 'digest'. In the assessment of the recent phase of integration, it shows how the management of these contradictions — politicisation v. bureaucratisation, continuity v. change, specialisation v. growth — has become increasingly difficult. It looks at the way in which the institutional reform agenda bears on the Commission.
