Investigating the Ambition of the European Commission in Justice and Home Affairs: The Cases of Hotspots and the EBCG

This Working Paper presents an analysis of the Commission's reform ambition in the field of Justice and Home Affairs, based on two policy episodes during the time period of President Juncker's Commission (2014 - 2019). The new intergovernmentalism is chosen as the theoretical background for the Working Paper, as it problematizes the notion of the Commission's ambition towards supranationalism, widely accepted by the previous theories. New intergovernmentalism is a theory explaining European integration in new areas of activity that occurred in the period after the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993. In this period, according to the authors, the power of traditional supranational actors has not increased in the way it has before. Methods of policy coordination, delegation to executive agencies, centrality of intergovernmental bodies and processes of deliberation and consensus seeking have replaced the classic community method as the main modes of integration. How does the new intergovernmentalism, with its expectations of the Commission's behavior, fare with seemingly ambitious attempts by the Juncker Commission to reform the governance of Justice and Home Affairs?