The Treaty Reform of the EU: Constitutional Agenda‐Setting, Intergovernmental Bargains and the Presidency's Crisis Management of Ratification Failure*

Abstract

This study empirically investigates the two options which were considered by the German presidency for finding a solution to the crisis of the EU's reform process. Our findings reveal that making concessions to the remaining eight ratification countries and renegotiating the text with all Member States were feasible solutions for reform. Copyright (c) 2008 The Author(s).

Enlargement and exit: The origins of Article 50

“…This may be attributed to intra-party or domestic politics. Alternatively, consistent with the logic of two-level games (Hug and König, 2002; König et al., 2008; Putnam, 1988; Schneider and Cederman, 1994) and brinkmanship (Schelling, 1960), the decision to call a referendum may have been a deliberate attempt to generate uncertainty and use this to extract surplus from the rest of the union.…”

“…When Germany assumed the presidency of the Council in 2007, it decided to strive for a new Treaty that would contain the most important reforms of the failed TCE (König et al., 2008). Lord Kerr, who had been Secretary General of the Convention, pushed for the inclusion of the withdrawal clause he had drafted (Kerr, 2007).…”

Challenges to Intergovernmentalism: An Empirical Analysis of EU Treaty Negotiations since Maastricht

“…Essentially, it drops any reference to, and symbols of, a full-fledged 482 D. Finke constitution. Furthermore, it provides for opt-outs from the Charter of Fundamental Rights and from Justice and Police Cooperation, and it delays the reform of the Council voting rules (Ko¨nig et al 2008). However, Irish voters temporarily stalled the ratification process when they rejected the Lisbon Treaty in June 2008.…”

Constitutional Dynamics in the European Union: Success, Failure, and Stability of Institutional Treaty Revisions

“…Such formal and quantitative approaches have studied EU treaty reforms from a bargaining perspective (e.g., Finke, 2009;Slapin, 2008). For example, quantitative research has analyzed the influence of domestic ratification hurdles (e.g., Hug & König, 2002;König, Daimer, & Finke, 2008) or the size of member states (Slapin, 2008) on bargaining success at single IGCs. The bulk of existing work in this tradition analyses the distribution of gains from treaty reforms among negotiating actors.…”