Introduction

In the EU and its Member States public spending is often perceived as being subjected to increasing European regulation over the years, due to the great economic interdependency of EU economies. A transfer of competences to the European level has indeed partly taken place over the past few years, but not entirely. To illustrate: the legal framework within which the Commission took its decisions on the aid operations of Member States to the ‘too big to fail’ banks, is essentially the framework that has existed since the 1950s to assess aid measures from the EU Member States. Nevertheless, the specific measures taken by the Commission within this framework could raise the impression of greater Brussels control over aid operations by Member States.

This perceived loss of control over ‘own’ government spending in the Member States, in addition to the distance felt towards Brussels decisionmaking concerning public resources at the European level, could lead to suspicion from taxpayers, but also from politicians and administrators, towards the EU project. The Europeanisation of decision-making processes need not, in itself, be problematic, as long as checks and balances are built in. Where such checks and balances are absent or are subject to erosion, issues of legitimacy can quickly arise. Therefore, the question arises: In Europeanised decision-making processes on public spending , what are appropriate guarantees, as Möller puts it, ‘as an attempt to align the legitimacy standards of foreign-policy action with those of domestic constitutionalism’?

This chapter aims to answer this question in the field of State aid surveillance . The European rules concerning aid measures granted by the Member States, which are aimed at preventing the distortion of competition on the internal market, have in time led to a complex system of European supervision on State aid as provided by Articles 107 and 108 TFEU, in which many actors, both at European level and at national level, play a role. The interaction between those actors could be considered to be an example of composite administration, which may colour the analysis of legitimising procedures and decision-making as mentioned above.

After this introduction, first, an overview will be given of procedures and decision-making processes in State aid matters and the interaction between the actors involved in the light of the recent modernisation of State aid control (section 2).