The contested nature of political leadership in the European Union: conceptual and methodological cross-fertilisation

Abstract

European leaders have struggled to find common responses to the polycrisis the EU is facing. This crisis of leadership makes it urgent that scholars provide a better understanding of the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy making. This article prepares the ground for a collection of contributions that addresses this need by strengthening old and building new bridges between the academic domains of European studies and leadership studies. It opens with a discussion of the contested concept of leadership in the context of the European polity and politics, challenging the conventional view that leadership is necessarily a matter of hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that rather than leaderless, the EU is an intensely 'leaderful' polity. Subsequently, this introduction identifies four key debates in contemporary EU leadership research and discusses the value and insights the contributions in this special issue bring to these debates.

Beliefs of political leaders: conditions for change in the Eurozone crisis

“…Bulmer and Paterson 2013). M€ uller and Van Esch (2019) argue that the Eurozone crisis led to significant changes in the exogenous environment of HSG, in terms of both the distribution of welfare and the legitimacy of European publics and member state governments. These exogenous challenges contributed to increasingly complex leadership at the EU level.…”

“…First, the EU lacked adequate mechanisms to deal with the crisis and these structural deficiencies caused severe deadlock in the EU's political system. As such, the crisis provided the setting for an exercise in collective political leadership (M€ uller and Van Esch 2019). The fragmented and multi-faceted EU leadership polity was tasked with making sense of the situation at hand, while providing meaning to its various constituencies through a coherent crisis narrative (Boin et al 2017;Van Esch and Swinkels 2015).…”

Collaborative leadership in EMU governance: a matter of cognitive proximity

“…The permanent president of the European Council also provides co-leadership and mediates among member states but only since 2009. Moreover, it is the European Commission that for decades has had the administrative and procedural resources to initiate and monitor EU policies, and that embodies the union's common interest without which the ongoing process of European integration would not work (Endo 1999;M€ uller 2016, 2017.…”

“…The first major event in the creation of Economic and Monetary Union was the publication of the Delors report (17 April 1989), on which EMU was later built (Endo 1999). The trio that oversaw the establishment of EMU in 1991, French president François Mitterrand, German chancellor Helmut Kohl and Commission president Jacques Delors, is generally seen as a team that worked well together and succeeded in constructing the compromise on which EMU was built (Dinan 2004;Krotz 2010;M€ uller 2019;Van Esch 2012). This judgement is shared by the experts who participated in our survey.…”

“…In the European Union several interdependent actors at the supranational and intergovernmental level share power and collaborate to govern and lead the EU together (Cramme 2011;T€ ommel 2014). As such, the European Union can best be understood as a leaderful environment (M€ uller and Van Esch 2019). Although scholars agree that no single centre of leadership exists in the EU, the topic of collaborative leadership has only recently gained traction in European studies (Nielsen and Smeets 2018;Smeets and Beach 2019).…”