One Europe: The Dream of Unity : Profile : Neither a State Nor International Organization : The workings of the European Commission may be arcane, but it has power.

It was Friday, Jan. 10, another variable feast for the 17 members of the European Commission.

Frans Andriessen, the commissioner for external relations, was huddling with the foreign ministers of the 12 European Community nations to discuss crises in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Bruce Millan, responsible for developing the Community’s poor regions, met with members of a Scottish association demanding development money for their area. And Jean Dondelinger, whose portfolio is cultural affairs, participated in the opening ceremony of the Brussels International Film Festival.

Holland’s Andriessen, Britain’s Millan and Luxembourg’s Dondelinger sit at the top of what is, in the United States, one of Europe’s least-understood yet most influential governmental institutions. It was the European Commission, for example, that initiated “EC ‘92”--the drive to tear down barriers to internal European Community trade--and has now set Europe on a course for political as well as economic union.

The commission, in turn, is just one element of a four-part government system unlike anything found in the United States or anywhere else on the globe.

“The European Community is not a political entity that is easily understood,” writes University of Pittsburgh political scientist Alberta M. Sbragia. “Unique in its institutional structure, it is neither a state nor an international organization.”

These are the pieces:

* The European Commission (based in Brussels). Although it is commonly described as the European Community’s executive branch, the commission generally does not execute policy. (That job is left to the 12 member nations.) Rather, the commission derives most of its power from being the only unit of EC government that can initiate policies.

* The European Parliament (which meets one week a month in Strasbourg, France, but whose administrative offices are in Brussels). This is a 518-member legislative body that, by and large, does not legislate. Although it can veto some proposed EC policies, it acts mostly in an advisory role.

* The Council of Ministers (which meets wherever it chooses). This is the unit of government that makes most EC policy, subject in some cases to veto by the European Parliament and in many to approval by the 12 national parliaments. The heads of the 12 EC governments meet at least twice a year to set Community policy. But most decisions are delegated to a subordinate level: foreign or trade ministers, for example.

* The European Court of Justice (based in Luxembourg). The court actually does what its name implies: It adjudicates disputes between EC institutions and between the EC and its member nations.

In this constellation of peculiar institutions, the commission may be the most bizarre of all.

With one exception, its members are chosen for four-year terms by the leaders of the 12 national governments--and many of them were sent to Brussels to get them out of the way back home. “It’s often akin to being put out to grass,” admits one commission official.

The one exception is the commission president, who is chosen by a consensus of the heads of the 12 EC countries. In 1985 and again in 1989, the EC heads picked Jacques Delors, who had been France’s finance minister.

Delors has, by all accounts, proved easily the most effective president the commission has ever had. As French President Francois Mitterrand’s popularity at home has plunged, Delors has become France’s most highly regarded politician, and he is considered likely to run for president when Mitterrand’s term expires in 1995.

The other 16 commissioners come to Brussels without portfolios. It is the president’s unenviable task to divvy up the jobs.

Most commissioners do not rank among Europe’s leading political lights. A 1990 EC poll showed that only 45% of EC citizens knew of the commission; of that 45%, slightly more than half had a favorable impression.

The commissioners are not accountable to any voters; their allegiance is to the commission itself--and, if they want to be reappointed, to the prime minister who sent them to Brussels.

The commission generally meets every Wednesday. A majority of nine commissioners is enough to exercise the commission’s unique power to send a proposal whirling through the EC’s labyrinthine decision-making process.

Unlike a U.S. President’s Cabinet, the EC’s commissioners range all over the political spectrum. The present commission has room for Leon Brittan, a card-carrying British Conservative who is responsible for antitrust policy, and for Vasso Papandreou, an activist Greek Socialist who is in charge of such volatile issues as workers’ rights.

Some of the commissioners manage to use their stints in Brussels to enhance their political standing back home. Delors is not the only commissioner in this category; Ray MacSharry of Ireland, who as the agriculture commissioner has drawn up a far-reaching and imaginative (if controversial) proposal to reform the EC’s complex web of farm subsidies, is considered a potential prime minister.

For other commissioners, the political landscape back home is not so appealing. The Greek Socialist government that sent Papandreou to Brussels has since been toppled, leaving her without much of a political future in her native land.

After Delors, the most uniformly well-regarded commissioners include Brittan; MacSharry; Henning Christophersen of Denmark, who helped gain approval by the 12 EC heads in December of a single European currency by 1999; and Martin Bangemann of Germany, who is responsible for proposing the regulations to implement the “EC ‘92” single-market program.

The hardest job, apart from Delors’, belongs to Holland’s Andriessen. As commissioner for external relations, he is not only the EC’s chief trade negotiator, but he is also responsible for talks with the many Eastern European nations that, freed of Soviet domination, are seeking some sort of association with the EC.

Brittan, who resigned as former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s trade and industry secretary in the aftermath of the 1985 Westland helicopter scandal, has proved the most aggressive of the commissioners. It was he, for example, who proposed blocking a French-Italian consortium’s takeover last year of De Havilland, a Canadian manufacturer of turboprop aircraft for commuter airlines. Over loud objections from France and Italy, Brittan mustered a bare majority of nine commissioners behind his argument that the takeover would have severely reduced competition in the European market.

The commissioners sit atop a bureaucracy of 16,720 civil servants who are divided into 23 directorates, or departments. (Some commissioners are responsible for more than one directorate.) About 15% of the Eurocrats have the job of translating EC documents into the Community’s nine languages.

EC pay is good: about $240,000 a year for Delors, $217,000 for each of the six commission vice presidents and $196,000 for the other 10 commissioners. Salaries for the Eurocrats range from an entry-level $22,000 to $150,000 for the most senior officials, and taxes, paid directly to the EC, are low compared with most national tax regimes in Europe.

The EC’s 1992 budget is about $84 billion, mostly raised from customs duties and a share of each member nation’s value-added tax proceeds. More than half--about $48 billion--is to be spent for agricultural subsidies, the one major governmental program that is financed by the EC itself rather than the 12 individual countries. Regional development, social and related programs will cost another $23 billion. Miscellaneous programs, including direct aid to poorer EC countries, will add another $10 billion; the budget for the EC staff itself is slightly more than $3 billion.

The four-year terms of the present commissioners run out at the end of this year. But the heads of government have already decided to switch commissioners’ terms to five years as of 1995, to make them coincide with the term of the European Parliament. That leaves 1993 and 1994 uncovered; a likely solution is simply to hold over the current commissioners for those two years.

That would enable Delors, if he chose, to remain in his high-profile job in Brussels, outside the rough and tumble of French politics, until the eve of France’s next presidential election. The leading candidate to succeed Delors, whether in 1993 or 1995, is Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, but Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales is moving up fast.