The Council: An Institutional Chameleon?

HELEN WALLACE* Council reform is a topic that has become a key issue in the wider discussion about reshaping the institutions of the European Union. This article explores ve different images of the Council: as a partner of the Commission; as a club of governments; as a venue for competition and bargaining between governments and other political actors; as an arena for networked governance; and as a consortium for developing transgovernmental collaboration. It is conventional to examine the Council as both executive and legislative in character. More interesting, perhaps, is its evolving practice as a forum for experimentation.
INTRODUCTION

Much of the recent discussion of institutional performance in the European Union (EU) has focused on the European Commission, especially in the wake of the events leading to the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999. The Council, the institutional forum of the EU member states, had been less the object of attention; yet it has become evident that it too needs closer scrutiny and critical appraisal. Both institutions were under review in the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) 2000, which had its agenda dened by the Amsterdam leftovers. These were the issues of reform to the Commission and the Council that the European Council failed to resolve when it agreed on the contents of the Treaty of Amsterdam in June 1997. As the EU faced the prospect of further enlargement, it became conventional wisdom that interlinked changes needed to be made to these two institutions in order to equip the EU to deal with a larger and more heterogeneous membership. Interestingly, this discussion, in effect, presumed that it was mainly the Council-Commission tandem that had to be put in order. Much less attention was given to the European Parliament (EP) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ), where it seemed to be agreed that any changes to be made were of a more or less technical character in order to handle the changing number of member states or the increasing workload. Moreover, the reforms under discussion in the IGC 2000 were also quite narrowly construed as regarded the operations of the Council and the Commission. In the case of the Commission, there was one agenda item, the number of members in the College of Commissioners. In the case of the Council,
*European University Institute Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 15, No. 3, July 2002 (pp. 325344). 2002 Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. ISSN 0952-1895

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there were initially two agenda items: the weights to be allocated to each member state when votes were taken; and the issue of how much further to extend the practice of qualied majority voting (QMV). As the IGC progressed during 2000, a third item was added: whether or not the Treaty of Amsterdam formula for closer cooperation (i.e., some policies to be developed by only some of the member states) should be amended to facilitate its operation. Frequent mention was made in the rhetoric and the specic propositions of practitioners of the underlying agreement not to disturb the existing institutional balance in the EU, a standard phrase of reassurance found in previous IGC debates. These issues for the IGC essentially relate to the public mechanics of decision-taking and representation in the two institutions, on which more comments follow below. They relate rather less clearly to the dynamics of EU decision-making or the ways in which the Council plays into these dynamics. They also take little account of the ways in which the EU has latterly developed its practices of building policy regimes. In particular, there is a puzzling paradox in the contrast between, on the one hand, the widespread criticisms of the EU institutions, accompanied by nervousness about their vulnerability to enlargement, and, on the other hand, the rather fast pace at which new policy regimes are being designed. In the case of the Council, things are made more complicated because it is quite difcult to get hard and fast data on how the Council works. The recent travails of the Commission have been extensively ventilated in public, and criticisms have been fed by the public discourse of Brussels as the site of unloved Eurocracy. Efforts to reform the Commission in practical ways (currently the responsibility of Neil Kinnock, one of the Commissions vice presidents) have also been wellventilated in public. Meanwhile, the Council remains shrouded in a good deal of secrecy, in spite of attempts over recent years to increase its transparency. There has been an internaland introverteddebate within the Council about non-treaty reforms to improve its performance, but most of the documents that relate to thisfor example, the Trumpf-Piris report1remain unpublished, and knowledge of their contents depends on access to samizdat versions until the point at which formal decisions are taken by the Council for publication in the Ofcial Journal. Many accounts of EU decision-making, therefore, have to make assumptions about how the Council works from scattered and unsystematic evidence. Only very few accounts either based on intensive qualitative interviewing, such as Jeffery Lewiss ne-grained analysis of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER), or (lucky Dutch speakers) beneting from more generous national access to documents (see, for example, van Schendelen) manage to look right inside this institution. I shall argue in this article that the Council has alteredand is alteringin signicant ways, both in terms of its internal properties and in terms of how it interacts with the rest of the EU political system. This latter, it should be noted, I take to include the politics of the member

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states, insofar as they are penetrated by and have an impact on the EU level of politics. A few preliminary distinctions may help to frame the discussion that follows. My starting point is the image of the Council and the Commission as a tandem or partnership, through which there is a kind of interweaving of the national and the supranational elements in the EU system. A second image of the Council is as a club of member governments, operating both individually and collectively in a kind of collusion vis--vis the other EU institutions and political actors, both at the EU level and within the member states. A third image of the Council is as a location in which there is a kind of persistent competition among the member states for relative inuence. A fourth image of the Council is as much less a monolith and more an arena through which (alongside the many other institutional arenas of the EU) networked governance (Kohler-Koch and Eising) operates. A fth image of the Council is as an institutional forum with more direct involvement in delivering some EU policy regimes. I have linked this image elsewhere (2000, 33 ff.) to a mode of making EU policies by intensive transgovernmentalism. These various images are important because they suggest that any critical appraisal of the Council needs to take account of these differentiated roles and properties, which also give rise to different behaviors. Thus, if, for example, we want to assess the effectiveness of the Council, we might make different observations depending on which image is appropriate. Similarly, judgments about possible lines of accountability or forms of representation need to vary depending on what image of the Council we assume. More generally, these varied images suggest that we are unlikely to nd a clear notion of institutional balance within the EU political system. Here it should be noted that the phrase institutional balance is favored by practitioners but absent from the academic commentary, which recognizes more explicitly the absence of clear institutional design in the EU. In what follows, each of these images is elaborated in a little more detail. I then discuss the ways in which the debate on institutional reform might be recast in the light of these different images. The article concludes with some observations on the academic interpretations of the character of the EU political system. We might just note at this stage that it is somewhat puzzling just how far both the practitioners debate and the scholarly discussion have become trapped by a series of conventional wisdoms about the character of the Council. These are not always well-founded in evidence.
IMAGE 1: THE COUNCIL-COMMISSION TANDEM

My rst image (in a personal sense, literally so) is of the heart of the EU political system being the Council-Commission tandem.2 In the early design and practice of the thenEuropean Economic Community, the development of policies rested on a close working partnership between

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the Commission, advocate and architect of collective European proposals, and the Council, forum of the member states for rening and then authorizing actions. It was a partnership that was intended to rest on a built-in institutional balance between what we would now call two levels of governancethe Community and the national. It was a rather selfsufcient partnership, in that the other EU institutions played much less important roles. The teeth of the ECJ as a source of compelling jurisprudence were only just becoming evident, and the EP had little relevance to policy outcomes. As long as the participants in the Council and Commission could keep on pedaling together, there would be a kind of synergy that would generate the dynamic propulsion for the system, as well as a sense of direction. While it might be tempting to dismiss this image as a piece of heroic imagination, it nonetheless explained a good deal of what happened. The two institutions evolved with a kind of parallelism. As the Commission developed its internal structures, so the Council developed its broadly similar specialized formations to provide the relevant interlocutors from the member states, meetingincreasingly frequentlyin separate collective gatherings. As the Commission also developed its own specialist services and advisory groups, so the Council developed an array of specialist working groups. The relationship between the two institutions did have a kind of partnership modehence mile Nols benevolent analysis of COREPER as a valuable contributor to the partnership and a vehicle for persuading the member governments to engage with the collective process. In the 1990s, a number of studies of the Council and COREPER (de Zwaan; Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace; Lewis) reported that at ministerial, COREPER, and working-group levels within the Council structure, there was a high degree of shared commitment to joint working, that there was a kind of socialization of those national ofcials and ministers involved, and that this produced an engrenage, or interlocking, of member state and Commission-based actors. These ndings about the Brussels end of the EU process also gained support from studies of national policy-making on EU issues. As had been pointed out in the early years (Wallace 1973), in this decade there were specialized policy communities in the member states (Rometsch and Wessels) that were locked into this process, ltering the European dimension to national policy and politics and engaging in extensive and increasing transnational cooperation. Indeed, there was a kind of agenda creep, as national policy-makers, working through the Council, with each other, and with the Commission, brought more and more issues for joint discussion at the Community table. If we look back over time, we can see that through this CouncilCommission tandem, the policy scope of the Community steadily expanded. Formal assignments of new policy competences generally followed rather than preceded the informal extension of Community discussion into areas that were not yet dened by the treaties as Community

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subjectsenvironmental and educational policies are both telling examples. In these cases, soft cooperation preceded hard regimes. Within the academic community, however, views became increasingly divided as to what was really happening. On one side of the debate were those who held to the view that the process was led by a collective dynamic, which one might call supranationalism, which created a compelling path-dependency of iterative collaboration. On the other side of the debate were those who held that, in effect, the member governments, as the principals, were becoming increasingly adroit at managing the process and instrumentalizing itincluding using the Commission as agentto pursue national goals and preferences. In essence, the debate concerned whether the Council or the Commission was grasping the handlebars of the tandem. Moreover, some changes were taking place that disturbed the image of the cozy Council-Commission partnership. These changes concerned new decision rules, enlargement of membership, new policy competences, experimental policy domains, and domestic politics. New Decision Rules As the EP acquired budgetary powers from the 1970s onwards and legislative powers from the mid-1980s onwards, so a bipartite institutional model was succeeded by a tripartite model, at least in those policy domains where the EP had strong footholds. Although this tripartism is still inadequately reected in much of the commentary on the EU, it has fundamentally changed the old institutional balance. From the early 1980s onwards, the Council started to decide more often by QMVat least implicitly so. This began to make it appear that the prior consensual practices were being eroded, although the evidence on this point is quite shaky. In some new policy areas, different methodologies applied, notably as a result in the invention by the Maastricht Treaty on European Union of the three-pillar structure. This deliberately based cooperation in foreign policy and in justice and home affairs on so-called intergovernmental cooperation through the Council, rather than on the old CouncilCommission tandem. Enlargement of Membership By the mid-1990s, the EU had grown from a Community of Six to an EU of Fifteen. Thus, the Council had changed fundamentallyor so it was generally perceivedby losing the apparent intimacy of a small circle of member states. More member states meant more heterogeneity, more idiosyncrasy, more varied coalitions, and the simple weight of larger numbers of people and organizations involved. Hence, the prior techniques of package-dealing and so forth became harder to utilize. More of the Councils attention was focused on its own internal bargaining and less on partnership with the Commission.

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New Policy Competences Policy competences grew apace, especially from the mid-1980s. Consequently, the range of issues to be grasped proliferated and, in practice, became locked into separated circles of sectoral specialists. Both in the Commission and in the Council, we can observe the structural fragmentation that followed. New directorates-general (DGs) were created for most new areas of work, or task forcesas DGs in waiting. New formations of the Council emerged, each underpinned by an array of specialist working-groups and high-level committees. It became increasingly hard to generalize about either the Council or the Commission; patterns of behavior and institutional dynamics varied between one sectoral arena and another. Cooordination between these arenas became harder and harder. The Council proved no more adept at counteracting this fragmentation than was the Commission. Experimental Policy Domains Among the new areas of policy that were drawn into the EU arena were several that touched deep sensitivities about national sovereignty. In particular, monetary policy, foreign and security policy, and justice and home affairs took forms of European cooperation into what had been regarded as the stuff of high politics. In each of these areas, the cooperation that developed had a quite different character from that of the early Community paradigm. No Council-Commission tandem was evident at all; neither would it be unless and until member governments were prepared to contemplate the Commission as their potential agent in these delicate elds. Domestic Politics As time passed, domestic politics in the member states became more relevant to the ways in which the EU institutions operated. It was increasingly difcult to conne the national debates on EU matters to charmed and relatively pliant circles of Europeanists. More debate and more controversy became evident in most member states, sometimes between different sectoral policy communities, sometimes between different levels of government. Mandates for national negotiators in the Council had to be more carefully crafted for most member states, involving rather tight negotiating instructions. In some member states the complications were even greater, in that the European arena was contested in fundamental ways in the domestic political process. Hence, the coziness of the old Council was more often disturbed by the presence of dissent and dissidence. An Outdated Image? The accumulation of changes suggests that the image of the CouncilCommission relationship as an interdependent partnership was either

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awed or has become obsolete. Such a judgment risks exaggeration. There are policy areas in which the two institutions still act together as the main anchor of EU decision-making. In some areas, such as the common agricultural policy or the main decisions on revenue and expenditure, it is still the dialogue between the Council and the Commission that determines the outcomes. Hence, Image 1 retains some relevance, and analysts of the process still have room for argument about which of the two institutions provide the direction for the tandem and about how equal or unequal the relationship is in practice. However, Image 1 is insufcient to provide a frame for understanding the full range of EU decisionmaking. Hence, an examination follows of four other images.
IMAGE 2: A CLUB OF GOVERNMENTS

The image of the Council as a club of governments suggests that the crucial feature of the Council is that it enables key ofce-holders from incumbent governments to operate collusively in relation to all comers. This image owes much to the insights from Robert Putnams metaphor of two-level games: chief executives use the international (in our case, EU) arena as a means of developing policy in their domestic arenas. The EU Council is par excellence an arena in which leading gures from the participating governments of the member states can utilize this highly developed transgovernmental arena to develop policies together, both to bind each other and to shape the outcomes of domestic politics. Here we should note an important point of semantics. All formal EU documents refer to representatives of the member states as the participants in the Council, following the conventions of international law. Those representatives are drawn from governments-in-ofce, which can take advantage of their European opportunities to reinforce their positions. The Council is an arena in the exclusive hands of incumbent powerholders. There is thus a sense in which the Council is a particularly uniform body compared with most other EU institutions. What marks Council members out from their various interlocutors is precisely their exercise of current political power in each of their national polities. What marks out the ofcials who take part in the committees and working groups of the Council is their duty to pursue the policies of their current governments. This makes for sharply focused behavior by all participants. One consequence of this is the potential to estrange other national politicians and national parliaments from the EU process. Council participants can explain their decisions as the results of collective commitments made behind the closed doors of their EU meetings. They can exchange understandings inside the Council about helping each other out in times of domesticespecially electoralpressures. There is a good deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that this is a frequent occurrence. This feature of the Council raises the barriers to systematic accountability through national parliaments.

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A second consequence of club behavior is that relationships based on the exercise of power often predominate over ideological afnity. Mutually helpful exchanges of support are not conned to colleagues from the same political family. The timing of decision-making in the Council is quite often determined by mutual agreement to take account of the exigencies of domestic politics in one or another member state. The building up of trust to increase the credibility of commitments exchanged often has more to do with the predictability derived from experience than with sharing the same political doctrines. It follows that it can take time for the representatives of a newly elected government to win the trust of established colleagues in the Council. Here I should note that there is a difference between those member states that operate on the basis of broadly based coalition and/or consensual politics and those that follow more adversarial patterns. In some member states, there are opportunities for politicians out of ofce to engage in the discussion of national policy options, while in others such opportunities are rare or nonexistent. Politicians entering ofce from adversarial opposition need time to earn the trust of their EU colleagues. Council members share an interest in preserving the scope to operate in a club-like way. However, this by no means precludes cooperation with useful allies. Nor does it preclude making use of the rest of the EU system to help with the politics of blame-avoidance. Thus, the Commission is in these senses a necessary partner to the Council. Commission-ledor apparently ledproposals can be helpful ingredients of Council collusion, and the Commission can provide the place to which the awkward buck is passed. Thus the Commission may be the agent of the Council operating collectively as a self-interested club. Similarly, other European agencies may play a comparable rolethe European Central Bank (ECB), in the case of monetary policy, or Europol, in the case of European police cooperation. Indeed, we can observe a trend towards the creation of a variety of agenciesnot only the Commissionto act as the agents of the Council club. I should note here in passing that this club identity of the Council is not evident only in relation to other EU institutions or vis--vis domestic political pressures. The Council club also operates in relation to other powerful economic and societal actorsbig companies, active social movements, and so forth, including, many would argue, consumer interests in the case of the common agricultural policy. Similarly, the Council club provides the ingredients of solidarity vis--vis external partnersthe U.S. government, candidate countries, and so forth. Thus, for example, the Council provides EU member governments with a collective vehicle with which to grapple with the predicaments of globalization. The club character of the Council has several consequences for the way its members operate. It helps to explain the tendency to reach decisions consensually, or at least without too much explicit voting. It helps to explain the resistance to opening up the Council to public access, in spite

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of the adoption of various formulae to improve transparency. It helps to explain the high barriers to stronger accountability mechanisms, whether through EU or through domestically routed procedures. Club identity may facilitate output, but at a price. One obvious question that follows is one of how cohesion is maintained within the club. How much similarity of character does there need to be among the members of the club for them to identify as a cohesive group? How much does this depend on the size of the club? We have little evidence to help us answer these questions. We can infer from the public versions of what the practitioners themselves assert that there is a considerable nervousness on their part that the club character may be vulnerable as numbers grow through EU enlargement. Whether or not that nervousness is warranted is another matter. The historical record of previous enlargements suggests that new members can be accommodated within the club without too much disturbanceto the extent that their relevant core interests and preferences are congruent with those of old members. The emergence in the IGC 2000 debate of proposals for closer cooperation reected, in part, a preoccupation with the question of whether or not the club character of the Council could be preserved, given just how different the next group of new member governments were presumed likely to prove. On the one hand, the nervousness was induced by experience based on earlier enlargements that had introduced difcult or exceptionalist members into the club; Denmark, the UK, Greece, and Sweden were the most frequently quoted examples, the vehemence of the tones of voice varying over time and over issues. On the other hand, it was commonly assumed that the next wave of new members was likely to prove especially hard to socialize. Note here that, in contrast to earlier Western enlargements, the new Eastern candidates were also less familiar interlocutors from other international settings, given how far EU member governments relationships with most of these countries had been channeled through the asymmetrical and dependency-based contacts of postcommunist transformation. In this context, proposals for an inner circle of vanguard countries have an appeal as a way of maintaining club cohesion. How far such assumptions were warranted is another question.
IMAGE 3: COMPETITION AMONG GOVERNMENTS

One obvious impediment to the cohesiveness of the Council as a club is the fact that there are limits to the congruence of member governments interests and preferences. Indeed, member governments have both directly competing interests on many issues and diverging views about what would make for an acceptable collective outcome on any given issue. The image of the Council as a place of sharp competition is prevalent in media commentary, fueled by the fact that the media remain

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largely national in character. To the extent that politics as such is a process of competition about the exercise of power, it is understandable that the Council should be viewed as a locus of rivalry. The image derives force from the language of bargaining, with its emphases on winning and losing. It also draws strength from those academic commentaries that interpret the EU as an arena of intergovernmental exchange, in which the participants represent egoistic governments. Much of the detailed evidence that we have on how individual governments prepare for and conduct themselves in the Council reinforces this competitive image. All member governments have procedures and processes designed to help their representatives in the Council to maximize their returns from EU bargaining. Some engage in systematic training of those representatives in negotiating techniques. One of the most popular kinds of training programs currently operating in the candidate countries is precisely on negotiating techniques for EU meetings. Much of the current academic commentary, especially from scholars based in the U.S., plays upand plays onthis image of the Council. Andrew Moravcsik has become the locus classicus in terms of macro theorizing. Applications of rational choice analysis to bargaining in the Council attempt to specify the interstate competition in game-theoretic terms. The new journalEuropean Union Politicsaims to publicize work in this eld, as reected in, for example, Clifford J. Carruba and Craig Voldens work or that of Mikko Mattila and Jan-Erik Lane (2001). The underlying argument is that the governments of the member states are driven by the need to project and to protect national interests, in the sense of those preferences that result from the domestic political process in each country. Governments then operate strategically to achieve as much as they can in the EU arena, thus behaving on the basis of rationally determined goals and strategies and adopting the tactics they judge most likely to achieve those goals. Governments will hand over to the collective forum the responsibility for pursuing collective policies, to the extent they judge that the EU agents (often the Commission, but similarly other EU agencies) are likely to carry out the assigned tasks. Here Giandomenico Majones (2000) point about the Commission as duciary rather than simple delegate, developed further in his article in this issue, is critically important. Governments will also judge the utility of collective delegation in relation to how credible they interpret the commitments of other governments to be. I might note that trust is a relevant factor here as well. A couple of requirements of domestic politics are relevant to the persuasiveness of this image. One is that the domestic political process should in practice be able to deliverand sustainthe political ingredients of rationality about translating domestic preferences into strategic goals. Thus, both governmental cohesion and governmental control are necessary requirements. Empirically, we can observe that these ingredients are not always present in all member states. In other words,

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governments sometimes make mistakes and suffer from incapacitating weaknessesand they do not always learn from experience how to perform more strategically. This does not necessarily undermine the general argument, but it cautions us to be alert to the practical limits to strategic behavior. A second and related presumption is that governments are not always professionally adroit in a more technical sense, either at the level of ministers or at the level of the ofcials on whom so much of the work of the Council depends. Here, too, there are variations in the professional capabilities of different member states. Hence, we should also note that part of the nervousness of practitioners from current member governments about enlargement is that new recruits will not have these capabilities and will thus be unpredictable and risky partners. These caveats notwithstanding, rationalist analysts of the Council as a place of competition among EU governments have a great deal going for their arguments. It is not surprising, therefore, that there should be such a burst of literature seeking to develop the arguments further or especially given the prevailing fashions in American political science seeking to devise models to explain, even to predict, the way in which this competition is played out (for an overview, see Schneider and Aspinwall). Much of this literature specically focuses on models of voting in the Council, both among the existing membership and also extrapolated to speculate about how voting might work in an enlarged EU. There was considerable resonance of this image of the Council in the practitioner debate in the context of the IGC 2000. Two of the key issues for resolution related precisely to the competitive character of the Council: the re-weighting of votes allocated to each member state for voting procedures, and the issue of whether and how to extend QMV to other areas of EU policy. The Council had inheritedand then periodically adjusted for enlargementan allocation of voting weights that deliberately gave disproportionate weight to smaller member states as an insurance policy to protect them from the presumed greater leverage of the larger member states in the EU process. However, the long list of candidates facing the EU contained many small countriessmall (in population terms) not only by comparison with other member states, but also with substantial non-state entities in existing member statesfor example, Bavaria, Catalunya, and Scotland. It appeared to many of the practitioners that simply to extrapolate from the old numbers would lead to an unacceptable situation in whichat least in theorya minority of the EU population could, in the Council, outvote a majority of the EU population. Not surprisingly, this view was especially prevalent among the politicians and policy-makers of the larger member states. Hence, a variety of proposals were developed to nd alternative and more balanced outcomes. The situation was complicated by the issue of how to treat the so-called larger member states, which otherwise were distinguished only by the fact that they had the right to nominate two

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members of the European Commission. Awkward factors in this discussion included the increased population size of Germany as a result of unication and the combativeness of the Spanish, who wanted assured status as a larger member state, faced with the probability of losing one of their commissioners. Already, during the IGC that had led to the Treaty of Amsterdam, a great deal of effort had been put into developing alternative formulae for re-weighting the votes of the member states. In the event, none provided a generally acceptable point of compromise. During the IGC 2000, this activity became even more sophisticated, as clever practitioners put forward yet moreoften mathematically complexformulae for consideration. The preparatory discussions took on some of the features of a political science postgraduate seminar in a department dominated by game theorists. In sharp contrast, the nal stages of the European Council in Nice in December 2000 provided a spectacle of erce competition for position, as objective criteria gave way to power-based wrangling (Wallace 2001). Yet, again, we need to enquire what the empirical base was for these concerns and for the strenuous efforts being made to nd palliatives. Though the Council can and does reach decisions by voting, usually QMV (though we should recall that other formulae are sometimes applied), in practice the Council does not vote explicitly all that oftenaround 2025% of eligible decisions. Thus the shadow of the vote seems more relevant, and it is the presence of a blocking minority that is often critical to whether a decision is taken or not. Even when the Council does decide by a vote, there are generally few explicit dissenters or abstainers. Moreover there is simply no evidence that the cleavage line often falls between large and small member states. Coalition patterns are much more varied. Hence, the concern is more a what if matter than an extrapolation of actual experience. This discrepancy between the concerns so publicly articulated and the inner workings of the Council suggests that some other factor underlies the preoccupation with voting rules and weights. The image of competition in the Council in essence raises the question of how power is distributed among the member governments in the system and how power is exercised. Insiders certainly do have their own notions of answers to these questions. They include assessments of the relative importance of a particular member state on any given subject under discussion Germany on monetary issues, Spain on sheries issues, even tiny Luxembourg on some taxation issues. They also include assessments of the political weights of the member states in the processfor example, of the powerful coalition of the French and the Germans on those issues where their objectives coincide. In addition, they include assessments of the veto power of individual member statesimplicitly or explicitly, depending on the issue and the country.

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Interestingly, however, the academic community has so far brought little of substance to the discussion of power in the Council and of the relative power of particular member states. The various studies of voting power remain stylized accounts rather than empirically informed evaluations. Studies of the impact of the Franco-German relationship have not been matched by studies of the impacts of other member states. More work needs to be done to identify both the ingredients of power and the ways in which power is instrumentalized. Thus, for the moment we are left with arguments that remain essentially assertions, rather than empirically supported propositions.

IMAGE 4: NETWORKED GOVERNANCE

The three previous images suggest a Council that has an identity of its own as an institution, however that identity is dened. An alternative way of understanding the Council is as one of several locations through which a form of networked governance is practiced in the EU. (Coined by Kohler-Kochin, for example Kohler-Koch and Eising 1999the phrase draws from a variety of studies by her, her immediate colleagues, and a large number of European scholars.) For some time, networks have been a preferred way of describing the character of decision-making and policy development in the EU (see, for example, Hritier; Peterson). Markens Jachtenfuchs recently wrote a state-of-the-art essay in which he skillfully surveyed European scholarship on the theme of European governance. The core of the argument is that the formal roles and responsibilities of EU institutions are less important than the multiple ways in which these institutionsalongside other national and transnational institutionsare used in order to deal with public policy issues and predicaments. This approach shifts the focus to process and to functions and away from formal decision rules or constitutional architecture. Instead, European governance is a more uid and malleable set of ways in which governmentsin the regular meaning of the termfrom the participating countries interact with a wide variety of political, societal, and economic actors to respond to pressures and demands for public policy and for political aggregation or arbitration. For these purposes, it is quite likely that the Council, like other EU institutions, will operate differently as a political location over issues and over time. Thus substantive investigation is the route to understanding the ways in which institutions structure behavior. One consequence of this approach is that it draws no hard and fast line between the national institutions of the member states and the transnational institutions of the EU. The relative weights of the national and the transnational elements are not dened in xed or stable proportions.

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Moreover, the political processes of the member states retain vitality on this reading of the European governance. Hence, careful empirical work is needed to establish the various ways in which the national and the EU elements interact. Most accounts that follow this kind of approach argue that the interactions are a product of multiple inuences that derive from ideas, interests, and institutions. Such accounts are informed by case and sectoral studies of EU decision-making, with the obvious benet of providing valuable and plausible explanations of how and why particular policies emerge, but with the obvious risk of being weak in terms of overarching generalization (Wallace and Wallace 2000 provide a range of accounts of this kind). A second consequence is that we then need to recognize that the EU institutionsfor our purposes here, in particular the Councildo not monopolize the relationships between the governments of the EU member states. These relationships are articulated in a variety of ways and through a variety of channels, both bilateral and multilateral, and including other European or international organizations. Among these interactions, it is perhaps the case that EU locations are of more salience and have more impact than othersbut not necessarily, and not necessarily on all issues. A third consequence is that we have to address the questions of accountability and legitimacy differently. If there is no clear institutional hierarchy, and if institutional responsibilities are diffusely arranged, then we cannot expect to nd neat and tidy channels of accountability or legitimation. Hence, those who favor such an approach are increasingly looking for alternative ways of addressing these issues. Thus, in the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschafts current program on European governance, a wide range of alternative processes is being appraised. Examples include studies of deliberative democracy through the committee systems of the EU, constructivist accounts of new policy regimes, and suggestions for nonparliamentary modes of legitimation. This is not the place to go into the details of these interesting efforts to characterize European governance or to bring normative theorizing to bear on its appraisal. The key point for this article is to note that the approach pushes the analysis away from the sharp denition of formal institutions and towards borrowing from a variety of other branches of political science and international relations, including the new institutionalisms, policy analysis, and constructivism. Hence, there is no reason to suppose that the Council should be viewed as a hierarchically superior institution within the EU system, although the continued vitality of the national level of politics makes it a very important location of discussion, persuasion, and bargaining. In terms of the practitioner debate, we might note two contrasting signals. At the level of detail, studies of networked governance and similar approaches produce portraits of what the practitioners do that most practitioners would recognize. However, they do not easily gener-

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ate specic proposals for institutional design or redesign of the kind that negotiators have to grapple with in IGCs.
IMAGE 5: INTENSIVE TRANSGOVERNMENTALISM

One of the longest-running debates about EU integration is focused around the choice between forms of supranationalism and forms of intergovernmentalism as a means of explaining the politics of the process. For the supranationalist, the Commission (along with the EP and the ECJ) is the most interesting institution in the EU. For the intergovernmentalists, the Council (along with the institutions of the member states) is the most interesting institution. Whatever the merits of the cases made by proponents of each approach, there appear to be instances of policy development in and around the EU to which this debate seems not very relevant. Recent years have seen the emergence of potentially strong collective regimes in which the action is not at all concentrated in the tussle or the partnershipbetween these two institutions. Instead, it can be argued, we can observe a new mode of European governance emerging, which I have labeled elsewhere intensive transgovernmentalism (Wallace 2000). In at least three areas, we can see forms of regime-building in the EU through institutional methodologies that are not at all like the conventional inherited Community method. These three areas are: the new single-currency regime; the emerging foreign, security, and defense policy; and the array of measures being developed in justice and home affairs. All are areas that touch the purported core of national sovereignty. All are areas that are increasingly difcult to address at the level of the single European state. All are areas in which there are other international arenas for cooperation as well as the EU. All are areas that, for a long time, were widely thought to be beyond the reach of the EU system of governance. Yet in each of these three areas we can see current and quite compelling evidence of regime developmentnot merely loose, permissive, and unconstraining cooperation, but ambitious, precise, and constraining cooperation. The methods for developing cooperation have several strong features. Each is being shaped by a powerful consortium of key national players: nance ministers, ofcials and central bankers; foreign and defense ministers and ofcials; and home or interior ministers and ofcials. Each bears the imprints of involvement by heads of state or government. Each has drawn in an interesting array of technical professionals from the relevant specialist corps. Each has been developed with rather little attention from national parliaments and rather little pressure from other societal actors (business interests seem to have followed rather than preceded the decision to create a single European currency). At the EU level, these nationally based actors have concentrated their interactions in and around the relevant specialist formations of the

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Council and European Council. The Commission has made rather limited contributions to the regime development, though quite how much is disputed in the accounts of each area. So far, the EP and the ECJ have been on the margins of the process. The Council Secretariat has come to play an increasingly important role in coordinating the regime development in the cases of, on the one hand, foreign, security, and defense policy, and, on the other hand, justice and home affairs. Note here the upgrading of the post of the secretary general of the Council and high representative of the member states. In each area, we can see the emergence of purposebuilt new agencies of collaboration, notably the ECB, and agencies such as Europol. The character of the commitments being made in each of these areas is to the development of hard regimes. The nature of what is envisaged seems far too ambitiously collective for the term intergovernmental to be an appropriate label. Hence, I have resurrected the term transgovernmental. Moreover, the volume and density of activity is considerablehence my choice of the epithet intensive. In each case, of the old EU institutions, it is the Council that is most evidently engaged. How each policy regime will develop in the future is hard to predict. The single-currency regime has already begun to develop its own new institutional architecture, in which the ECB clearly plays a key role, working with its accompanying consortium of national central banks. Econ, the specialist Council formation of nance ministers, has gained strength in the Council system from its enhanced area of operation, although it remains to be seen how the Econ/ECB relationship will settle down. In the case of foreign, security, and defense policy, developments are not yet consolidated, although a new section of the Council Secretariat is being developed and defense ministries are much involved. It remains to be seen whether and how the Commission will be associated with the regime andcritically importantwhat kind of partnership will develop with NATO, currently the owner of relevant joint assets. Note here that the NATO regime is also a hard policy regime in important respects. In the case of justice and home affairs, a mixed system is in operation: some elements are communitarized, while others remain very transgovernmental, with the eventual shape of the regime as a whole still to be resolved. It may be the case that these new areas will increasingly come to resemble more conventional Community methods of work. This author, at least, rather doubts this. Alternatively, it may be that what will take shape are new ways of locking the participating governments into deep mutual commitments, with a combination of the Council and new collective agencies providing the location for regime management. If this latter option is the one that emerges, important questions will have to be analyzed about the performance of the Council and about the methodologies of collective delegation in these nationally sensitive domains.

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The other new example of regime development is in the benchmarking approach adopted by the Lisbon European Council of March 2000, building on a series of European Councilled initiatives. Here the main tools of policy development are coordination, national comparison, and voluntary transfers between member states of best practice. The underlying character here is soft cooperation as an end in itself, deliberately elastic and not overconstraining, following the example of techniques pioneered elsewhere by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As far as the EU institutions are concerned, interestingly, the central organ for the moment is the European Council, taking a direct part in establishing a seminar mode of collective activity, with annual sessions now planned to take the process forward. Sherpas, operating on behalf of heads of state or government, have been brought in as progress-chasers, emulating the model of the G7 economic summits. I have deliberately identied this as a different way of working because of the explicitly soft character of this new and developing process. It could be argued that this might better t as an example, under Image 4, of networked governance. However, the newly emerging techniques outlined above seem to have characteristics not captured either by the literature on networked governance or by that on interstate competition. Instead, we can observe policy techniques in which the primary actors are leading national policy-makers, operating in highly interactive mode and developing new forms of commitment and mutual engagement.
INSTITUTIONAL REFORMSTHE PRACTITIONERS DILEMMAS

If these different images of the Council carry some cogency, then it would follow that reforms to the Counciland to the way it interacts with other institutions, agencies, and locations of European governanceneed to be approached in several different dimensions. Currently we can observe three lines of reform: the IGC process involving formal rule changes; the internal reform process within the Council itself; and reforms via changing praxis. In 2000, the IGC process was dened in narrow and mostly orthodox terms, but with two new elements creeping into the discussion. One was the articulation of the desire to nd a way of retaining a version of the Council as a special club, to be protected against both the problemposersor reluctant integratorsamong the current member states in the EU15 and unpredictable new recruits. The second was the reinforcement of the concept of the Council as a forum of competition for power among the member states, reected most vividly in the explicit differentiation between large and small countries. As for internal nontreaty reform, the Council spent a great deal of time during 1999 and 2000 in the effort to streamline itself and to improve its

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performance on its own members criteria. One particular focus of attention was the attempt to reduce the number of specialist formations, and another was the quest for more effective intra-Council coordination. The new documents of summer 2000 (Council 2000) show rather scant evidence of serious inclination to reform on the part of the member governments. Small changes to the Councils internal rules of procedure and a limp commitment to reduce, at the margins, the number of Council formations hardly mark a watershed. More interesting by far are the changes being born out of praxis. As has been outlined above, new institutional methodologies are being crafted, especially the new transgovernmental regimes and the new techniques of soft cooperation. What kinds of fruit they will bear may be a matter for speculation, but the initial trends are interestingly in contrast with other areas of the Councils and the European Councils work. We might note in passing that neither the IGC process nor the internal reform process bring much to the quality of the Councils ways of operating in these newer areas. Also the other bodies that seek to inuence the development of the EUs institutional architecture seem barely to have focused on these newer areas, let alone make substantive propositions on how these might be institutionally anchored. One other element of praxis deserves a mention, given the revived interest in exibility and closer cooperation. There are those (both academics and practitioners) who are keen to advocate formulae for closer cooperation by brave pioneers (Chirac; Fischer; Philippart and Sie Dhian Ho). For me, at least, their approach is excessively formulaic and astonishingly ahistorical. The history of integration, transnational regime-building, and collective multistate action in Western Europe is littered with examples of closer cooperation among smaller groups of countries, some more structured, others more informal or ad hoc. There is no reason to suppose that other such ventures will not recur, or old ventures be revived. Indeed, much of the contemporary patchwork of transnational cooperation owes its origins and some of its continuing dynamics to such ventures, as I have argued elsewhere (Wallace 1999). It is quite another thing, however, to try to precook this kind of process. For me, inventive praxis may well be a more productive route than treaty-constrained mechanical formulae.
ACADEMIC INTERPRETATIONS: THE CHALLENGE TO SCHOLARSHIP

One of the curious features of EU scholarship, especially as practiced by European scholars, is just how much the focus of academic attention is shaped by the way that the practitioners frame the core questions. Much of the academic commentary on the EU institutions has thus been locked into the practitioners agenda and into parallel and co-opted evaluations of the process. However, if, as I have argued in this article, the Council is a more complex and chameleon-like beast, then much of the academic

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commentary misses a great deal of what is most interesting in the dynamics of institutional evolution. We can discern at least three lines of investigation that might protably be brought to bear. One would be to explore the plausibility of the different images of the Council outlined in this article. A second would be to delve in far more depth into the assessment of the exercise of power in the Council and its interactions with the rest of the EU system. A third would be to monitor as systematically as possible the new regimes being developed, in order to assess how these new policy technologies feed back into the workings of the Council, perhaps generating another new image of this institutional chameleon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to numerous friends and colleagues (some anonymous) for both analytical and practical insights. The interpretations, aws and all, are the responsibility of the author.
NOTES 1. 2. This report of March 1999 emanated from an internal working group of the Council Secretariat, led by Jurgen Trumpf (then Secretary-General) and Jean-Claude Piris (Head of the Legal Service). This was a favorite phrase of mile Nol, rst Secretary-General of the Commission, from whom I rst heard it in autumn 1967!

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