Power accrues to job that Jacques built: Delors transformed the post that European leaders are squabbling over, writes Andrew Marshall in Brussels

'MOST agreeable,' Roy Jenkins is said to have intoned as he was told of the many worldly privileges that went with being President of the European Commission. The pounds 140,000 salary, entertainment allowance and other perks are certainly an attraction: but now it is also one of the most powerful jobs on the Continent.

The post that all Europe is squabbling over carried little weight 15 years ago. It has been transformed by Jacques Delors, the outgoing President, who welded power and authority together to make himself both admired and loathed.

The Commission, which the new president will head for a five-year renewable term, is one of four institutions that really matter in the EU. It is the bureaucracy, which makes proposals and implements decisions. The Council of Ministers brings together ministers from national governments and makes the decisions. The European Parliament revises legislation and agrees it. And the European Court of Justice decides whether the law has been correctly applied or broken. It is within this delicately balanced structure that the president makes his mark.

Under Mr Delors, the office became a key locus of power, not just in the Commission, but in Europe as a whole. 'Delors turned the Commission upside-down,' writes Charles Grant in his book Inside the house that Jacques built. 'He gave it a sense of purpose and taught it to respond to his will. Power and ideas started to flow top-down instead of bottom up. The Commission's achievements, such as the 1992 programme, won international acclaim, and its officials put a swagger in their stride.'

The president stands at the pinnacle of an 18,000-strong organisation. Perhaps the best way to describe this odd creature is as a civil service with attitude. Its 23 different directorates are staffed by officials from each of the EU's 12 states, who run policy. The 17 commissioners, one from the smaller seven states and two from the five large states, each a former minister or senior civil servant, are all national appointees. With their cabinets, composed of advisers, they provide direction.

The president is primus inter pares among the college of Commissioners, with few special powers in the treaty. Each commissioner has one or more areas of responsibility, and the president is consulted on the share-out. The president looks after the commission's administrative services, including some key parts of the bureaucracy: its secretariat-general, the spokesman's service and its think-tank. But, more important, he leads the organisation, representing it internationally, and providing political direction.

The Commission initiates decisions and implements them. Its right of initiative is perhaps its most jealously guarded privilege: in many areas, the EU can only work once the Commission has turned on the switch. The Commission is also responsible for carrying through the results of legislation. In some areas its rights are strictly limited, and it is more or less the agent of national governments. In others, however - the Common Agricultural Policy and competition policy, in particular - it has far more wide-ranging powers to run its own writ and to exercise day-to-day control.

The Commission has a third and rather more nebulous role as the guardian of the treaty and as the institution that embodies the European spirit. That is the Big Idea that animates it. It is the source of the Commission's authority and its raison d'etre. Yet it contains a paradox, for the Commission's powers are all dependent on member states and the documents they have agreed.

As Derrick Wyatt and Allan Dashwood note in their legal textbook, European Community Law: 'It has only those powers of implementation that have been conferred on it either directly by the treaties or by the Council' - in other words, by national capitals.

The president of the Commission is, like any other member, required to be a person 'whose independence is beyond doubt', the treaty says. This has to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Robert Marjolin, French Commissioner in the first Commission, says of the first president, Walter Hallstein, that he was very much the creature of Konrad Adenauer, the German chancellor. 'The truth of the matter is that, inevitably, the members of the Commission, however dedicated to the European idea, had to take the positions of national governments into account or risk losing all their effectiveness.'

This is one area where Mr Delors has suffered frequent criticism - that he is pro-French, intervening on behalf of Paris. Grant quotes the judgement of Lord Cockfield, a former British Commissioner: 'Several Commissioners share Cockfield's judgement that 'Delors was better than average' at disregrading his own country's interest'.' But he adds: 'However, while Delors may be less nationalistic than many of his colleagues, he has more clout, which has benefited France.'

The lesson of 10 years of Mr Delors would seem to be that personality matters, and that is why the race has become so heated. It is undoubtedly the case that strong presidents, such as Mr Delors, can turn the Commission into a redoubtable instrument, while in the hands of weaker men it becomes a fragmented bureaucracy.

Now, after Mr Delors, the Commission faces a series of interlocking problems. Its work on the 1992 programme is over, and it lacks a clear agenda for the years ahead. But, most importantly, there is a deep divide between and within the member states about the way forward: should it be to deepen institutional integration, or to consolidate what is already there? The man who fills the office in 1995 may find that it is a far from agreeable place for the next five years.