Who Sets the Agenda? How the European Council and the Team Presidencies Are Undermining the Commission’s Prerogative Doreen K. Allerkamp ECPR SG EU – Porto, Portugal, June 24‐26, 2010 Abstract Since the beginning of the European integration process, setting the EC/EU agenda has been the European Commission’s main claim to relevance in the context of EU policy making; its exclusive right of legislative initiative its most important prerogative. However, this paper ar‐
gues that quite apart from having to contend with an increasingly assertive European Parlia‐
ment, the Commission has seen its role challenged in its core responsibilities from the direc‐
tion of the Council, as well: the European Council has taken to pre‐programming its own (and, by extension, the EU’s) agenda; Council members push their preferred initiatives via the rotating Council Presidency; and the Presidency itself has emerged as a highly politicised (team) player, enabling member states to (jointly) predetermine the EU’s political agenda months and years in advance. Introduction Since the beginning of the European integration process, setting the EU’s agenda has been the European Commission’s main claim to relevance in the context of EC/EU policy making. Based on the founding treaties (TEC, Articles 211‐219), the Commission, “the most suprana‐
tional” institution, “is the initiating body”: it “has the right of legislative initiative and there‐
fore also of political initiative” (Werts 2008: 45/46). This exclusive right to formally initiate legislation under the ‘Community’ method is its most important prerogative (cf. Christiansen 2006a). Its agenda‐setting power rest on the fact that in “most areas of legislation, it enjoys the formal monopoly to direct proposals to the Council”, and that under QMV, adopting a Commission proposal is easier for the Council than to alter it with unanimity (Schmidt 2000: 38, cf. Peters 1994, Tsebelis/Kreppel 1998). Beyond its formal role in the EC/EU’s policy pro‐
cess, the Commission maintained a “capacity … to construct agendas for EC action” (Christi‐
ansen 2006: 103) even during the difficult 1970s and 1980s, after the Empty Chair crisis and the ensuing Luxembourg Compromise had cut off its political ambitions. This “has made the Commission a pivotal actor in the EU policy process, placing it in a privileged position” which has allowed it “a part in framing the issues, setting the agenda” (ibid. 100). The Commission’s formally exclusive right of legislative initiative is the most obvious way for it to set the EU’s political agenda, and in the literature there is a broad consensus that “only with agenda setting … the Commission has the institutional power to realize its own interest and therefore has a well recognized impact on the integration process”.1 But, as Princen (2007: 23) points out, it “would be a misconception ... solely to equate agenda‐
setting in the EU with the activities of the Commission, even under the first pillar. To begin with, even though the Commission has to make the eventual formal proposal, the impetus for this proposal may lie outside of the Commission (cf. Peters 2001; Pollack 1997: 125–6). 1
Schmidt 2000: 42. The other side of that coin is the Commission’s option to withdraw a legislative proposal from the Council, an option which, however, is only a credible alternative for the Commission if it finds other ways of influencing the legislative process; cf. ibid.: 56. Page | 2 Because of their institutional positions in the EU decision‐making process, member states, the Council of Ministers as a whole and the European Parliament try regularly to induce the Commission to come up with a certain proposal.” Furthermore, all actors’ ability to influence the agenda is circumscribed by the inevitable impact of factors beyond their control, notably unforeseeable internal or external events demanding a short‐term response (such as natural disasters or acts of terrorism, for example). In addition, a considerable portion of the EU’s agenda is institutionally pre‐determined, because “much of EU business is now conducted in the form of multi‐annual programmes”, including spending (e.g. the structural funds) and regulatory programs (e.g. in environmental or social policy), which require periodic revision and/or renegotiation (Christiansen 2006b: 156). Most seriously, though, the Commission has seen its role as agenda setter challenged di‐
rectly and indirectly by the Council. In principle, the “Council’s position as the key legislative institution of the Union implies a reactive role: it has to respond to the proposals made by the Commission”, which is “why traditionally the Commission rather than the Council is re‐
garded as the agenda‐setter in the EU policy process. But there are a number of ways in which national governments have sought to regain control of, or at least play a part in, the setting of the Union’s agenda” (ibid. 155). They have done so specifically through the Council Presidency and the European Council. II. Political Leadership by the European Council Before the European Council came into existence, the Commission’s role had already been curtailed, starting with “the rules of conduct emanating from the ‘Luxembourg Compromi‐
se’” (Werts 2008: 46; cf. the Final Communiqué of the Extraordinary Session of the Council, January 29, 1966). A French aide‐mémoire on the role of the Commission and its relations with the Council had put the argument as follows: “Co‐operation between the Council and the Commission is the driving force of the Com‐
munity and should be manifest at every stage. Consequently, before finally adopting a proposal of particular importance for all the States, the Commission should consult the Governments at an appropriate level. Such consultation would not impair the power of initiative and preparation with which the Commission is invested by the Treaty; it would simply oblige this institution to make judicious use of it” (ibid.). Subsequently, the Council issued a statement largely echoing the French suggestions: “In order to improve and strengthen this co‐operation at every level, the Council consi‐
ders that the following practical methods of co‐operation should be applied, these me‐
thods to be adopted by joint agreement, on the basis of Article 162 of the EEC Treaty, without compromising the respective competences and powers of the two Institutions. Page | 3 1. Before adopting any particularly important proposal, it is desirable that the Commis‐
sion should take up the appropriate contacts with the Governments of the Member Sta‐
tes, through the Permanent Representatives, without this procedure compromising the right of initiative which the Commission derives from the Treaty” (ibid.). Effectively, thereafter, the Council has had “the power to try to shape and initiative of the Commission at the earliest stage” (Werts 2008: 46). When, in addition, the European Council was founded in 1974, it started undermining the Commission’s prerogative the moment it came into existence. As Bieber/Palmer (1975: 315) observed a long time ago: “The Commis‐
sion’s role of initiator of policy proposals has been blunted not only by the unanimity rule but also, particularly with regard to major Community policy initiatives, by the summit ‘pack‐
ages’”. They point to the example of a decision by the 1974 Paris summit, the founding mo‐
ment of the European Council, to activate the Regional Fund: “In this case the summit repla‐
ced the Council in taking a major, detailed decision concerning a matter which clearly lay within the competence of the EEC” (ibid., emphasis in the original). Control of the agenda of the European Council – and hence of the EC as a whole, since this is the institution intended to provide political leadership for cooperation in Europe – had been given to all member states collectively in 1974. But since the foreign ministers as a group engaged in preparatory discussion “did not constitute a functional forum for the for‐
mulation of a delimited and manageable agenda”, political summit preparations “were en‐
trusted to the Presidency” (Tallberg 2006: 55). Following the 1975 Tindemans Report (cf. Tindemans 1976), pointing to the need to further strengthen leadership of the Council and to the Presidency as the right means of achieving this, as well as suggestions by French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to the same effect, the European Council's 1977 London Declaration “explicitly granted the Presidency a role in the advance preparation of ... [its] agenda, and assigned … [it] the task of providing the only record of conclusions” (Tallberg 2006: 55; cf. European Council 1977). By the mid 1980s, the Presidency’s “special responsibility for the agenda of European Council meetings had become institutionalized”, which involved fairly discretionary trimming to “proportions amenable to bargaining” (Tallberg 2006: 55). A routine of political prepara‐
tion especially of European Council Summits had become established that would remain es‐
sentially the same until 2002, involving a Presidential tour des capitales and a preliminary exchange about the agenda in the General Affairs Council. The formal incorporation of the European Council into the Treaties (with the Single European Act, SEA) and the definition of its role (with the Treaty on European Union, TEU) coincided less with functional changes than with adjustments of practice with some political consequences.2 The European Coun‐
2
Since Maastricht, many Commission reports, communications and even proposals have been addressed directly to the European Council, instead of the EP or Council of Ministers (e.g. the Agenda 2000, the Lisbon Strategy and the European Page | 4 cil’s main task was formulated very broadly in the TEU – the “European Council shall provide the Union with the necessary impetus for its development and shall define the general politi‐
cal guidelines thereof”3 – and these “terms of reference [have] resulted in the European Council now operating as agenda‐setter for the Union”, even though “it should not be con‐
cluded that setting the agenda of intended activities is a task of the European Council, laid down in the treaties” (Werts 2008: 37, emphasis added). Still, the “European Council takes, in its role as agenda‐setter, the major political initiatives and determines the position of the Union on major issues”, and in “a certain sense this task as agenda‐setter logically includes a very substantial part of the vast range of activities” (ibid. 38, emphasis in the original). For the Council Presidency, the organization of two summits in the country of the Presidency, one informal and one formal towards the end of its tenure, created “two opportunities to shape and structure the agenda of the European Council”, whereby especially “the substan‐
tive agenda of the informal meeting truly constituted the exclusive domain of the Presi‐
dency, which was at liberty to decide the theme for these summits” (Tallberg 2006: 56). The 2002 Seville reform package further institutionalized the drawing up of the European Councils' agendas and conclusions, further removing it both from the influence of both the Presidency and the Commission. Thus, the Presidency's previously informal bilateral pre‐
Summit agenda consultations have become regular, managed pre‐negotiations; and even the agenda of informal summits has been removed from the Presidency's control to the ex‐
tent that the European Council has adopted a habit to “pre‐program its own agenda, in an effort to achieve greater continuity in policy development” (ibid.). Informal European Coun‐
cil Summits in the spring generally address EU activity in the fields of employment, competi‐
tiveness as well as development, while the informal fall meeting is dedicated to questions of immigration and cross‐border crime. Finally, the Lisbon Treaty recognizes the European Council as an autonomous institution whose role is to impart political impetus, though expressly not to perform any legislative functions.4 The Treaty also introduces decision modes other than consensus to the European Council, so that it can decide by qualified majority on, inter alia, the creation of Council con‐
figurations other than the Foreign and General Affairs Councils; the nomination of the Com‐
mission President (taking due account of EP election results and after consultations); as well as the appointment or dismissal of the High Representative with the agreement of the Com‐
mission President. Like those of agencies, the European Council's acts will also be subject to judicial review by the ECJ. It is not yet clear what cumulative effect these changes, and espe‐
cially the replacement of the European Council's rotating Presidency with a semi‐permanent citizenship). “In so doing the Commission seeks endorsement by the Heads of Government”; moreover, it “regularly happens … that the acting President asks the Commission to report directly to the European Council on an important political subject”; Werts 2008: 47, 48). 3
TEU, Article 4; OJ C325, December 24, 2002: 11. 4
It can, however, act as an "emergency brake" in the fields of social security as well as judicial cooperation in criminal matters. Page | 5 President (to be elected by the members of the European Council for a term of 30 months, once renewable), will have on the relative influence and agenda setting powers of the Pre‐
sidency and the Commission, respectively. But it appears that in the context of the European Council, the member states had begun to substitute collective leadership and agenda control for that of individual presidencies already before the establishment for a quasi‐permanent, elected Presidency. III. Agenda Management by the Rotating Council Presidency Perhaps the most important role the Council Presidency plays lies in its leadership function, which enables it to shape the Council’s and, by extension the EU’s, agenda. From the begin‐
ning, its procedural tasks included agenda preparation – as in typing up and distributing5; but “[f]rom the late 1960s onwards, EC governments formalized and extended the Presidency’s agenda‐management responsibilities” (Tallberg 2006: 47). In this early phase, this happened mostly in the context of European Political Cooperation (EPC): in 1970, the Luxembourg Re‐
port assigned the Presidency the task to “set and structure the foreign policy agenda” on the basis of member state proposals (Héritier 2007: 123). In addition, it was to determine the ex‐
tent and mode of crisis response coordination among member states. Based on the Luxem‐
bourg Report, "[i]n formal terms, all member states shared the same right to propose sub‐
jects for political consultation. In practice, the Presidency, as first among equals, gained the primary responsibility to set and structure the foreign policy agenda” (Tallberg 2006: 51). This was underlined in the 1973 Copenhagen Report, which made explicit the Presidency's special role in the initiation of foreign policy consultations. It had negative consequences for the Commission’s agenda setting role: one “way in which the role of the Commission has been diminished is by the Council adopting ‘resolutions’”, which were not provided for by the Treaties, and only in “some cases, but by no means in all, the Council has based resolu‐
tions on suggestions made to it by the Commission. Council resolutions threaten the func‐
tion of the Commission to the extent that they usurp the Commission’s role of initiative” (Bieber/Palmer 1975: 315). In terms of political leadership in the Council more broadly, the 1979 Report of the “Three Wise Men”, initiated by the European Council to determine further avenues of institutional reform, argued that the “virtual breakdown in Council work under some particularly ‘bad’ Presidencies … has shown that if the Presidency does not do this job, there is no longer any‐
one else who can fill the breach” (Committee of the Three 1979: 30). Accordingly, govern‐
ments enhanced the Presidency’s role in “stabilizing and shaping the EC’s political agenda” with several reform packages and continuous adjustments of Council practice, but without Treaty change (Tallberg 2006: 48). The 1981 London report, while leaving the Presidency's 5
Cf. Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community 1958, The Rules of Procedure, as reproduced in Westlake 1999, 130 – 133; tasks reaffirmed in the wake of the 1965 Merger Treaty in updated Council Rules of Procedure not formally adopted until 1979, cf. Tallberg 2006, 47. Page | 6 agenda‐management function largely unchanged, specified its role in preparing the agenda for and summarizing the discussions of the informal "Gymnich" meetings of foreign minis‐
ters. “The degree to which agenda setting had devolved upon the Presidency was reflected in a reminder in the report that other states could submit proposals for action as well” (ibid. 52). By the mid‐1980s, “the Presidency had become the central managing force in the Coun‐
cil” (ibid. 48, 53), in charge of the agendas of the various Councils, committees, and working groups. These developments gave rise to the argument that they would allow the Presidency to manipulate the Council agenda, as an incumbent would seize the opportunity to promote initiatives in its own interest – “an image that national politicians were often keen to en‐
courage, and which their national press often fostered” (Hayes‐Renshaw/Wallace 2006: 148). Thus, in 1983, “in recognition of the political dimension of its agenda‐management re‐
sponsibilities”, the European Council sought to introduce a certain standard of accountability for the Presidency in requiring it to present its work program to the EP at the beginning of its tenure and to report on its progress at the end (Tallberg 2006: 48; cf. European Council 1983). The presidency’s stronger leadership role was also evident in its evolving relationship with the Council Secretariat, which from the early 1980s “gained a more pronounced advi‐
sory role” under the leadership of General Secretary Niels Ersbøll (Tallberg 2006: 49). This went so far as to lead some to describe the Council Secretariat as having become “largely a Presidency Secretariat in a much more explicit sense than was previously the case” (Wallace 1985: 12). Neither the SEA nor the TEU fundamentally changed the Presidency's leadership role, which rather “continued to develop in an incremental fashion and in response to demands for initiative and coordination in the Council” (Tallberg 2006: 49). From the mid‐1980s, agen‐
da management evolved toward “executive, political functions” (ibid.). The decision to com‐
plete the internal market before 1992 and the expansion of EC activity into new issue areas (including regional and environment policy) with the SEA and the TEU resulted in a steep rise in the number of meetings, to which the member states responded “by conferring on the Presidency an explicit authority to prioritize among competing policy concerns” (ibid. 50). This is reflected in each Presidency's comprehensive work program for its tenure and was re‐
inforced by “the formal conferral in 1993 of a right for the Presidency to propose issues for general policy debates” (ibid.). The steadily growing number of informal meetings in the country of the Presidency, “with agendas dictated by the host government” (ibid.), also un‐
derlines the Presidency's move into policy initiation. In parallel, it has held on to its central position in managing the EPC agenda throughout this period, despite the successive rounds of institutional change in the realm of foreign policy cooperation (cf. ibid. 53). The later 1990s and early 2000s saw no fundamental Treaty‐induced change in the Presi‐
dency's leadership role; rather, there was some incremental evolution (cf. ibid. 49) as well as Page | 7 change in European Council working methods, which collectively had the net effect of con‐
straining Presidency initiative to a certain extent. The “most significant development” (ibid. 50) of the period followed from member governments' efforts to create further mechanisms of continuity in light of the problems accrued and anticipated in the wake of the 1995 and in preparation for the 2004 enlargements. Accordingly, measures to strengthen the Council Se‐
cretariat in its support function and to facilitate coordination between successive Presiden‐
cies were elaborated and implemented (inter alia in a 2002 Secretariat report (Council Secre‐
tariat 2002) and a series of Council documents between 1999 and 2002, cf. Tallberg 2006: 50). In June 2002, at the Seville European Council, a number of internal reforms to the Council were agreed, including the introduction of an “annual operational programme” to be adop‐
ted by the two member states due to take on the Chair in a given calendar year in the De‐
cember preceding their tenure. “This has led the two countries who each year hold the Pre‐
sidency for six months to work closely together, not only in terms of agenda‐setting and le‐
gislative planning but also in organisational and logistical terms”.6 The Seville European Council also formalized the existing practice of multi‐year legislative agendas by introducing multi‐annual strategic programmes to be drawn up jointly by groups of six consecutive pre‐
sidencies (European Council 2002). The clearest expression of a Presidency’s leadership claim is to be found in its compre‐
hensive work program and the targets it specifies for its six‐month tenure. This program en‐
compasses an extensive “political declaration of intent” specifying the incoming Presidency's policy priorities as well as an overall meeting schedule for the duration of its tenure, inclu‐
ding preliminary agendas for all ministerial‐level Council meetings. The importance of this exercise to individual Presidencies becomes evident when we observe that, despite the fact that the Council Secretariat's current “Presidency Handbook” states that the “Presidency no longer makes six‐monthly programmes” (Council Secretariat 2006, 13), precisely because they have supposedly been supplanted by annual and multi‐annual strategic programs, suc‐
cessive incumbents have continued to pursue this “normal practice”, as the German Presi‐
dency put it in 2007.7 Nonetheless, the joint programs do have some effect: “[i]n the past, regular agenda items were interspersed with some new ideas, with the clever presidencies trying to judge policies that suited their interests and were rising to the point of agreement in any case, thus claiming a double credit for their resolution. (…) Since the introduction of strategic and operational programmes that have to be 6
Christiansen 2006b: 156. According to Christiansen, this was to some extent “a move towards informally achieving something that the idea of the Team Presidency [as envisioned during the Convention on the Future of Europe] was supposed to deliver: member states working together and sharing the administrative burden while providing the Union with greater stability and continuity in its overall direction”, ibid. 7
Cf. the Presidency website, http://www.eu2007.de/en/The_Council_Presidency/Priorities_Programmes/index.html [ac‐
cessed February 2nd, 2008]). Page | 8 agreed jointly with other member states, there is greater constraint on individual presi‐
dencies regarding the content of their presidency programmes.”8 Even though it appears to have lost some of its clout in terms of agenda‐shaping, the Pre‐
sidency still determines the political priorities of its tenure and thereby also commits itself to the results it hopes to achieve. The inherited issues on the table notwithstanding, the Chair is able to make room for additional questions it might want to address, vary the degree of emphasis put on the open issues, and even avoid addressing certain topics by altogether by excluding them from the agenda (which means they are left for a subsequent chair to tackle, cf. Tallberg 2003, Christiansen 2006: 156). This allows the Presidency to use its leadership function to a certain degree in its own interest – not, however, by imposing its own substan‐
tive preferences on its peers, but rather in protecting those preferences by taking critical issues off the table while it is in no position to effectively defend its preferences on them due to its commitment to reaching an agreement, especially when and where the incum‐
bent’s national preferences run counter to the prevailing majority on a given issue. Hence, the incumbent tries “to act strategically to influence the agenda in order not to end up in a situation during its Presidency where it has to take responsibility for an issue in which it has strong national interests and is in a minority position” (Elgström 2003: 51), because in this case, like in a deadlock, the pressure would be enormous for it to overcome the divisions through “unilateral sacrifices” in terms of its own preferences, that is, “to pay the price of the Presidency”.9 Furthermore, because a ‘successful’ Presidency has come to be associated with (signs of) progress in terms of European integration, the office, forcing and at the same time allowing the incumbent member state to come up with an agenda for its Presidency, makes further integration a priority (if temporarily) for that member, no matter what its original preferen‐
ces. As a result, rather than presenting a prime opportunity to pursue national interests, preparing and holding the Council Presidency puts a premium on pursuing integration: more European integration becomes the national interest. The way in which this priority is trans‐
lated into policy depends on the Council’s current agenda; but given that the incubation pe‐
riod for the vast majority of EU output is rather longer than the six‐months tenure of an indi‐
vidual Presidency, the pressure to prioritize integration progress over idiosyncratic national demands is to a certain degree felt by more than just the incumbent, as member states be‐
gin to plan ‘their’ Presidencies years ahead of taking office. This may introduce an element of competition, as member states vie and scheme for the biggest events (e.g., an enlarge‐
ment, or an agreement on an important new policy) and the most important steps in Eu‐
8
Hayes‐Renshaw/Wallace 2006, 148. In the authors’ view, “early experience of the strategic programme for 2004‐6 and the annual operational programmes it has spawned appear to be positive in terms of continuity and coherence”, ibid. 9
This is an ideational part of the Presidency effect (cf. Allerkamp 2007): the strong “spirit of consensus” that has emer‐
ged in the “EU milieu”, and in particular the Council with its long “shadow of the future”, plus the pervasive “effective‐
ness norm” (“[t]he foremost duty of any Presidency is to get results”, Elgström 2003: 44‐47). Page | 9 ropean integration (i.e. the conclusion of an IGC and the signing of a new Treaty) to fall into their tenure. As many of these are subsequently known by their place of origin (e.g. the ‘Maastricht Treaty’, the ‘Copenhagen Criteria’, etc.), they can perpetually signal a Presiden‐
cy’s and thus a member state’s imprint on the integration process and on the European project as a whole. The latest example of this behavior was the insistence of the Portuguese Presidency to have the Reform Treaty signed in Lisbon – even though the summits were all held in Brussels – in order to be able to call it the Lisbon Treaty. This kind of symbolism has at least partially been undermined by the decision to hold all future European Council meetings in Brussels. Similarly, attempts to fortify the Union by strengthening the Council Presidency through the slowing or abolition of member state rota‐
tion and the establishment of a permanent office holder for the ministerial and European Councils, respectively (as provided in the draft Constitutional Treaty10 as well as in the Lisbon Reform Treaty11), may actually backfire by creating new tensions between the pretensions of agenda control of individual member states, the quasi‐permanent office holder – and the Commission, which continues to have a seat at the table. Conclusions The Presidency and the European Council “offer opportunities for national governments, and for the collectivity of states, to influence the setting of the EU’s agenda and to maintain con‐
trol over the direction of EU policy. In that sense, they are aspects of the institutional struc‐
ture which assists member states to balance the agenda‐setting powers of the supranational institutions, in particular those of the European Commission” (Christiansen 2006b: 160). As a consequence, in the eyes of one observer, the “Commission has never developed as a politi‐
cal body” (Werts 2008: 46), since over time, “a practice of transferring the right of initiative in important questions to the European Council” emerged (Kapteyn/VerLoren van Themaat 1998: 412, cited ibid.). What is more, the “Commission agrees that only some ten percent of its proposals relate to proper initiative … . Nowadays, … it is the European Council which ini‐
tiates” (ibid.; cf. Agence Europe, September 14, 2002: 5). The plethora of assignments ema‐
nating from every summit meeting not only undermines the independent position of the Commission, which formally “shall neither seek nor take instructions from any government or from any other body” (TEC, Article 213.2). It also perpetuates “a practice whereby the right to make the proposals in important matters of policy moved to the European Council” (Werts 2008: 47). At the same time, the Council Presidency has been and continues to be 10
11
Cf. Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, CONV 850/03, Articles 21, 23.4. Cf. OJ C 306, December 17th, 2007: 17) with regard to Article 9C.9. Page | 10 able to wield considerable influence by shaping, albeit not freely setting, the agenda in its leadership role.12 The Commission’s formally exclusive right of legislative initiative is the most obvious way for it to set the legislative agenda. However, this formal right has been undercut by the Euro‐
pean Parliament’s and the Council’s right to request such a proposal, which effectively means the right to initiate legislation is shared with the very institutions which subsequently decide upon it. In such cases, the Commission is left with the prerogative to (initially) frame (the first draft) of this legislation, but it can hardly be said to be initiating it. Thus, while the Commission itself retains the right to initiate legislation independently of such requests, this right is not, as a matter of practice, exclusive, and the Commission faces competition as an agenda setter even in terms of this, its formally exclusive, competence. Further, the Commission’s power of initiation is “intimately bound up with the develop‐
ment of policy expertise”: when it produces legislative proposals, “the Commission employs the technical expertise of its specialised directorates‐general and its extensive network of expert committees” (Tallberg 2002: 27). However, the expertise at the disposal of the Euro‐
pean Parliament and, especially, the Council with its various issue‐specific constellations and vast reservoir of national experts to draw on is hardly inferior to that of the Commission. Hence, while Council and EP might be happy to rely on Commission expertise for enforce‐
ment and implementation purposes (to the extent that the latter is not handled by national experts, anyway), it is not clear why either should allow an informational advantage of the Commission in the context of agenda setting or during the legislative process. This is espe‐
cially the case for the Council, where the Presidency in its broker and leader roles will ma‐
neuver to acquire whatever informational advantage might be necessary in order to suc‐
cessfully broker a deal and achieve a specified goal on the agenda (cf. Allerkamp 2007). Finally, the Commission’s loss of independent agenda setting power at the hands of the European Council and the Council Presidency might be construed, actually, as strengthening the Commission’s role in unanticipated ways. Hence, in ‘intergovernmental’ policy areas such as Justice and Home Affairs or CFSP, where member states used to take most of the ini‐
tiatives, “especially as the result of the European Council launching a stream of requests, the Commission was handed the opportunity … of submitting its proposals”, too (Werts 2008: 47). But beyond the greater scope for Commission action, it may have greater impact, too. In early 2007, Commission President Barroso “stated that he would not male legislative propo‐
sals until after the European Council had given a positive response in his draft”, as otherwise, the chances of having the Commission’s suggestions adopted were very low.13 Since before 12
As touched upon above, the Presidency fulfils a number of different roles, too, and the “continuing increase in the im‐
portance and power of the Presidency as a broker in the negotiation process” as well as the growing activity of CORE‐
PER and the Council’s General Secretariat have “also diminished the Commission’s role” (Werts 2008: 46). 13
Werts 2008: 48, citing an interview by Simon Taylor with Barroso in European Voice, January 11, 2007: 1. Page | 11 the European Council arrived on the scene, the fate of many Commission initiatives and pro‐
posals was to be effectively ignored by member states, it seems credible that the “under‐
lying … motivation of the Commission to deal with the European Council … is that while its initiating task may be undermined in the legal sense, its proposals once adopted in the Eu‐
ropean Council enjoy the support of the highest political leaders” of the member states” (Werts 2008: 52). And hence, it becomes possible to conclude that “although the European Council has eroded the initiative‐taking powers of the Commission, it has simultaneously up‐
graded the latter’s political position” (ibid., emphasis in the original). Indeed, it might be pos‐
sible to go even further and argue, with Jan Werts (2008: 53) that the Commission “even goes so far as to use the European Council as an effective vehicle to present its own priori‐
ties”, or to overcome opposition or deadlock in lower‐level specialized Councils – which may lead to “the paradoxical sight of the Commission carrying out its initiating role not by means of its formal rights, but via the back door of the European Council”. Page | 12 Bibliography Allerkamp, Doreen (2007), “The Presidency Effect”, paper presented at the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Tenth Biennial International Conference, Montreal, Canada. Beach, Derek/Mazzucelli, Colette (2006), Leadership in the Big Bangs of European Integration, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Bieber, Roland/Palmer, Michael (1975), “Power at the Top – the EC Council in Theory and Practice”, in The World Today 31:8, 310‐318. Bulmer, Simon/Wessels, Wolfgang (1987), The European Council. Decision‐Making in European Politics, London: Macmillan. Christiansen, Thomas (2006a), “The European Commission: the European Executive Between Continuity and Change”, in Richardson, Jeremy (ed.), European Union. Power and Policy‐
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