The European Council, Improvisation and the Politics of Events

Jean-Guy Giraud
Former clerck of the European Court of Justice, Former Director of the European Parliament, Former President of the UEF-France

Luuk Van Middelaar[i]

Quand l’Europe improvise: dix ans de crises politiques

Collection Le Débat, Gallimard, Paris 2018

The primacy of the European Council

In his book, this well-known author[ii] brilliantly develops an argument which we can summarily present as follows:

• the European Union has been built in order to avoid the renewal of fratricidal strife,
• the EU has been built on a rule of law basis, which has progressively brought peace and unified the European Sates (“the politics of the rule”),
• however, its initial structure (“the community”) has been incapable of coping with the big political crises which have emerged in the last two decades (Euro/ Ukraine/ Migration/ Brexit/ Trump),
• consequently, the EU had to “improvise” the creation of a complementary and parallel structure (“the Union”) equipped with a political power which is apt to face those crises with a different method (“the politics of events”),
• this structure is managed by a new “Institution”: the European Council, within which the Member States freely cooperate in order to manage those crises with methods that go beyond the limited rules and competences provided by the “Community”.

This summary does not do justice to the clarity and richness of the long argument presented by the author, based on the specific case of the management of the abovementioned crisis by the EU. Therefore, we recommend reading this book entirely, especially to those who are interested in the recent evolution of the great institutional balances within the European Union institutions.

The weakness of the European Council

The purpose of this summary is, however, more specific. In particular, we would like to think about the merit of the author’s conclusion: is the European Council appropriate to the role that has been assigned to it, namely the supreme political power of the EU?

Luke Van Middelaar limits himself to noting the incapacity of the original institutions to face “events” through “the politics of the rule”, from which the necessity of “improvising” and resorting to a different method and a different forum has risen.

He does not even try to develop those arguments which would allow the questioning of the real capacity of the European Council to manage the “politics of events”, even though those doubts are several and actually well-known. Below, we will try to enumerate them without going into detail or trying to give them an order:

• the European Council is not, strictly speaking, a “European” body, insofar as its members are, first and foremost, national representatives and they only exercise this function marginally and ex officio,
• their European legitimacy is, therefore, secondary or “derivative” – unlike the legitimacy of the Parliament and the Commission (or of the Court of Justice), institutions which are specifically European,
• the members of the Council cannot feel the same feeling, neither individually nor collectively, of common and collective solidarity and responsibility as the members of other Institutions,
• they only intervene in the European sphere in an intermittent and inevitably limited way (in time as well as in authority) because of the primacy of their national functions,
• the very composition of the Council is unstable because of the quasi-continuous renewal of its members,
• the consideration of the national interests of each of them affects heavily (and legitimately) their respective positions within the Council,
• moreover, each state may successively take different positions as its leaders renew,
• the representativeness and the authority of some members may be upset by the instability or even by political crises that may affect their national regimes,
• some members may even display extreme eurosceptic positions, which could prevent the good functioning of the organisation (because of the consensus rule),
• due to their leading function, all members are strongly exposed to the immediate reactions of their public opinions; they only are – and feel – directly responsible for those opinions,
• these various factors result in a great difficulty for the college to define precisely and in a long-term way the “general political directions and priorities” of the Union (see Article 15 TEU),
• de facto, certain members of the Council are “more equal” than others due to the great disparity in the economic, demographic and political influence of their different States,
• even within the Council, it is likely that geopolitical alliances or groups of interests develop,
• because of its dominant position and because of the interaction between “general” issues and specific Community policies, the Council is increasingly involved in the management of the “rule” itself.^[iii] On another note, we could mention the case of “the improvisation” of the Council in the election of the new leaders of the EU occurred on last 3^rd of July 2019.

Thereby the limits of this hybrid construction of European governance, which raises the question of the need for reform, are revealed to us. In which direction is this reform needed? There is only one complete model that can theoretically be conceived - in the light of political science as well as historical examples: the one of federalism, which is capable of taking different forms depending on the circumstances and the political realities. In the present circumstances, it is difficult to discern any evolution of the Union towards this model. However, it is equally uncertain that it can sustainably endure this situation of institutional compromise, which has been so brilliantly described by Luuk Van Middelaar.

In conclusion, the author’s detailed description of the Euro crisis (2010/2012) is probably one of the best of the kind.

Translated by Cecilia Mellana

[i] http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Le-Debat/Quand-l-Europe-improvise ; there is also an English edition of the book: Alarums and Excursions. Improvising Politics on the European Stage, Agenda Publishing, 2019.

[ii] Luuk Van Middelaar has been the adviser to Van Rompuy during his presidency of the European Council (2010-2014); https://www.euronews.com/2019/04/25/van-rompuy-advisor-warns-of-european-day-of-reckoning.

^[iii] The best example of this is the adoption of the multiannual financial framework of the EU, in which the European Council de facto plays a predominant role.