Delegation, Comitology, and the Separation of Powers in the European Union
Alexander Ballmann, David Epstein, and Sharyn O’Halloran
Introduction
In 1988, the European Community (EC)1 and the People’s Republic of China signed an Agreement on Trade in Textile Products, which set quantitative restrictions on Chinese imports into member countries.2 In 1996, the European Commission (Commission), which oversees and monitors the implementation of the agreement, found that the Chinese authorities had issued export licenses for textile products that exceeded the 1995 quantitative limits agreed upon between the EU and China. As a result, the products sent from China remained blocked on entry at European customs ports. The Chinese authorities admitted that an error had occurred, mostly due to a breakdown of the computer system. But other complicating factors, especially the falsi cation of export licenses, also hindered the Chinese administration’s ability to monitor the granting of export and import authorizations. Under the circumstances, the Chinese authorities requested the application of exible measures by admitting the 1995 imports and reducing the 1996 quotas by an equal amount. On 6 March 1996, the Commission called an urgent meeting of the Textile Committee, which is an oversight committee that serves under the auspices of the Council of Ministers (Council).3 At that meeting, the Commission proposed to accept the Chinese solution of charging the 1995 breaches against the 1996 quotas,
1. We use European Union (EU) hereafter rather than EC, even for events occurring prior to the entry into force of the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) on 1 November 1993. 2. The agreement was provisionally applied in the EU by Council Decision 88/658/EEC. Council Regulation 3030/93/EC on Common Rules for Imports of Certain Textile Products from Third Countries (as amended by Council Regulation 3289/94/EC) de nes the system for importation into the EU of textile products originating in third countries that are linked to the EU by agreements, protocols, or arrangements, or that are members of the World Trade Organization. 3. The Textile Committee was a Regulatory III(a) Comitology Committee (see Art. 17, Council Regulation 3030/93/EC). We address the differences among the different types of comitology committees and their relation to the Commission and the Council at length later in this article. International Organization 56, 3, Summer 2002, pp. 551–574 ?? 2002 by The IO Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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