Jean-Claude Juncker has had enough of EU states scapegoating Brussels for their failures.

Over his first two years as president of the European Commission, he has been repeatedly undermined by countries passing the buck to Brussels on toxic decisions about controversial topics like genetically modified food and pesticides.

In response, Juncker is preparing to hit back. Next week, he is expected to launch an overhaul of the EU’s obscure and dysfunctional decision-making process, which allows countries to saddle the Commission with the final call on critical but potentially unpopular policies.

His goal: to overhaul the so-called “comitology” process and force national governments to take responsibility for decisions made in Brussels.

A stark example of how the EU’s legislative sausage gets made will take place next month when European countries need to decide whether to clear genetically modified crops for cultivation. The countries have been unable to reach a verdict. If they fail to agree in March, the European Commission will be forced to take the decision, leaving Juncker, yet again, to take the flack.

Juncker vented his frustration about the EU’s policymaking process in his State of the Union address in September.

“Proposals aren’t published, votes are held in secret and no information is published as to who voted what” — Franziska Achterberg, food policy director for Greenpeace in Europe

“It is not right that when EU countries cannot decide among themselves ... the Commission is forced by Parliament and Council to take a decision,” he said. “So we will change those rules — because that is not democracy.”

He also expressed fears that the bloc had slipped into an “existential crisis” and accused member countries of never having been “so weakened by the forces of populism and paralyzed by the risk of defeat in the next elections.”

His anger with member countries had already boiled over in the summer. Fed up with constant sniping from France and Germany about the EU’s trade policy, he threw responsibility for ratifying a landmark trade deal with Canada to the bloc’s 38 national and regional parliaments. It was a high-risk strategy, nearly collapsing the deal when the Belgian region of Wallonia objected three months later.

Stop passing the buck

Juncker wants to change the way decisions are made to ensure that member countries take responsibility for the policies the EU puts in place.

Last week, he told his commissioners at a weekly meeting that the EU decision-making process — and specifically the little-known area called comitology — needed to become “more democratic and transparent.”

According to people briefed on the meeting, Juncker highlighted Germany’s decision to abstain in last month’s vote over GM crops. Berlin, he said, knew full well that doing so would put the onus for a final decision on the Commission.

He told governments, collectively known as the Council, it was time to step up to the plate. “I want that the Council of Ministers takes political responsibility,” he told his staff gathered on the 13th floor of the Commission.

Largely unknown to most Europeans, the word “comitology” is a neologism coined in Brussels by splicing the word “committee” with the suffix “-ology.”

It refers to committees of experts consisting of officials from the Commission and national governments, who are meant to take technical decisions on anything from safety requirements for offshore oil operations to intellectual property rights. But for the EU’s critics, it epitomizes what is wrong with the bloc’s democratic process: faceless Eurocrats voting on items of public interest behind closed doors and without public scrutiny.

Indeed, next month’s vote on GM crops will not by made by ministers or lawmakers inside the European Parliament but by civil servants within a comitology body known as the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals and Feed. It is these meetings that Juncker will try and reform next Tuesday — to gleeful celebrations in parts of Brussels.

“This is one big black box,” said Franziska Achterberg, food policy director for Greenpeace in Europe. “Proposals aren’t published, votes are held in secret and no information is published as to who voted what.”

The results of the comitology process were also on display in June last year when representatives of the EU’s national governments failed to come to an agreement on the reapproval of glyphosate, the active substance in Monsanto’s ubiquitous herbicide RoundUp. Forced to try to resolve the disagreement, the Commission extended the license for glyphosate to the end of 2017, to criticism from environmentalists.

Trapped in the labyrinth

Policy snarl-ups like this have pushed the EU’s decision-making architecture to a grinding halt, according to Daniel Guéguen, a professor at the College of Europe and head of strategy for the lobbying firm PACT European Affairs.

“It simply does not work,” said Guéguen, who wrote a book entitled “Comitology: Hijacking European power?” and has spent decades advising businesses on how to navigate the EU’s complex legislative process. “It is very, very complex, and very few people understand how it works.”

The problem for Juncker and his team of legal experts inside the Commission is how to change the rules. Officials with knowledge of discussions that took place during the last weekly meeting of commissioners say not everyone is on the same page.

Some members of the Commission feel the disadvantages of the comitology process are largely contained to issues that fall under the remit of DG SANTE, the branch of the Commission tasked with policies on food safety and pesticide approvals. Others believe Juncker is right to want to force national governments to take more responsibility.

A Commission “options paper” on how to reform the comitology process lays out four ideas. They include changing the voting rules so that abstentions are not counted when calculating the qualified majority needed in a committee. Another option would be to refer decisions back to the Council of Ministers if national experts fail to reach a conclusion.

The other two options are a proposal that would require a positive majority only in sensitive areas surrounding health and food safety, and a scheme in which countries would vote multiple times until a conclusion was reached.

“The idea is to make member states take responsibility for the decisions they take in Brussels and actually explain at home what they decided and why they think it makes sense,” said Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the European Policy Center, a think tank based in Brussels.

“The process could get worse rather than better” — Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the European Policy Center

Others say Juncker’s proposals could trigger new problems.

“The options the Commission has put on the table have clearly been developed without any regard for the need to ensure a predictable science-based decision-making process,” said Graeme Taylor, director of public affairs for the European Crop Protection Association, a pesticide lobby. “We are opening Pandora’s box.”

Nathalie Moll, secretary-general of EuropaBio, which represents companies in the pharmaceutical, chemical and agricultural sectors, urged for the proposals to be “immediately withdrawn.”

“Any changes to the existing system that do not uphold science-based decision-making threaten to expel innovation from the EU at a time when the EU should be promoting innovation, growth and jobs,” she said.

Others worry that Juncker’s proposals could backfire, introducing even more politics in an area where science should be preeminent.

“The process could get worse rather than better,” Zuleeg said. “In every political system you have systems to take technical decisions without going through big political process. The difficulty is judging what is purely a technical decision and what actually carries political weight.”