This article examines a leadership paradox at the heart of EU foreign policy between the demand for effective European leadership, and leadership legitimacy embedded in state practices. This paradox is manifested in the Lisbon treaty that delegated significant formal leadership functions to the European level. We probe the question how and by whom leadership can and should be performed in EU foreign policy. To answer this question, we advance a new theoretical framework drawing on sociological institutionalism and role theory. We argue that leadership should be understood as a social role shaped in a process of interaction between leader and followers. We contribute with new empirical knowledge of leadership role relations based on an interview survey conducted in 2016. The empirical results point to role conflicts over the formal leadership functions in EU foreign policy and the emergence of new informal leadership practices by EU member states.
Leadership in the European Union is an empirical phenomenon that has increasingly come to attract scholarly attention. While a call for leadership in the EU is often heard, not least in times of crisis, it is also accompanied with a general reluctance to centralize powers. This leadership paradox has historical roots and has resulted in a dispersed type of leadership governance at the EU level. Scholarly work varies from mainly descriptive accounts of leadership by particular individuals to more theory-testing approaches to leadership. The academic field of EU leadership studies contains variation along three primary dimensions: (1) how leadership is defined, (2) by which theories it is explained, and (3) through which empirical cases and approaches it is studied. First, there is a wide differentiation in the literature of how leadership is defined and approached as an object of study. Four leadership approaches can be distinguished in the literature, focusing on the role of individuals, an actor’s position, the process of leadership enactment, and the outcomes produced by leadership. Second, leadership in the EU has been theorized and explained in a variety of ways. Explaining leadership in the EU requires an understanding of what power resources different actors draw on, ranging from material to institutional and ideational powers. These sources often also translate into different types of leadership strategies. A substantial amount of research has departed from rational choice institutionalism, which highlights the importance of a formal position to exercise leadership. Sociological approaches have more recently attracted attention to conceptualize leadership as a social role based on the interaction between leaders and followers. Third, the empirical study of leadership in the EU encompasses a range of different approaches in terms of the type of actors studied, the issues covered, and the data and methods used. EU leadership studies include different types of leadership actors ranging from individuals to institutions, member states, and the EU itself as a global leadership actor. The empirical policy domains vary from issues relating to treaty amending processes, environment and climate policies, eurozone governance and crisis management, to foreign and security policy. Although comparative studies of leadership in the EU exist, the focus has predominantly been on single actors during particular policy processes. An increasing use of explicit comparative designs in the study of EU leadership could have the potential to further advance theory building in the scholarship of EU leadership.
This article focuses on the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the EU on cooperation within the Council of the EU. It does so by studying how cooperation between member states has changed from the period before the Brexit referendum to the period after. In the emerging literature on Brexit, it has been highlighted that member states that have been close partners to the UK will have to (and have started to) adjust their cooperation behaviour and form new alliances. While the structure of cooperation in the Council is often understood to be stable over time, suggesting that cooperation is mainly driven by structurally determined preferences that don’t easily change, a major event such as Brexit may force remaining member states to restructure their cooperation behaviour. Accordingly, it is expected and tested whether less structurally determined preferences have grown in importance for shaping patterns of cooperation in the immediate period following the Brexit referendum. Using survey data based on interviews with member state negotiators to the Council, asking about their network ties, compiled both in the period before and after Brexit referendum of 2016, it is shown that structurally determined preferences are important in both periods and that more volatile ideologically-based preferences on the EU integration dimension and GAL-TAN dimension have become important following the referendum. The article is informative both for those interested in the effects of Brexit on EU institutions, as well as those more generally interested in causes of cooperation patterns in the Council.
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