The unseen hands: Collaborative instrumental leadership in the British renegotiation case

Abstract

The article contends that an important but overlooked explanation for the European Union's resilience in the past decade in the face of several existential crises has been the informal instrumental leadership roles played by EU institutional actors collaborating with each other. In this article, a theoretical framework is developed that can explain why EU governments, facing a crisis, would choose to informally delegate leadership tasks to a set of EU institutional actors. A three-part mechanism of collaborative instrumental leadership provided by institutions is devised that explains why governments informally delegate leadership tasks to EU institutions, and the effects of this informal delegation. The core of the article is a process-tracing case study that explores how collaborative instrumental leadership actually works. The case selected is the British renegotiation of their terms of membership in 2015-2016. While the case has become more-or-less forgotten because the shock 'no' vote in the June 2016 Brexit referendum made its terms moot, the deal included quite exceptional reform proposals in which the EU bent over backwards to accommodate the United Kingdom, perhaps even going beyond the bounds of the EU Treaties themselves in the issue of immigration. Given this, analysing how collaborative instrumental leadership supplied by institutions contributed to producing the ambitious deal can shed light on the processes whereby intractable problems in the EU have been solved in the past decade.

New Institutionalist Leadership – how the new European Council-dominated crisis governance paradoxically strengthened the role of EU institutions

“…Interestingly, work had been underway much longer internally within both the Council Secretariat (and its legal service), and the Commission in response to earlier demands for exemptions. For example, the British proposal in December 2010 for a protocol granting exemptions in Eurozone governance had led the Council Secretariat Legal Service to explore how these concerns could be dealt with legally (Beach and Smeets 2019). As a result, the institutional network therefore entered the negotiations with a running start, but this meant that the ensuing negotiations would run along tracks laid out by the institutions (Beach and Smeets 2019).…”

“…For example, the British proposal in December 2010 for a protocol granting exemptions in Eurozone governance had led the Council Secretariat Legal Service to explore how these concerns could be dealt with legally (Beach and Smeets 2019). As a result, the institutional network therefore entered the negotiations with a running start, but this meant that the ensuing negotiations would run along tracks laid out by the institutions (Beach and Smeets 2019). This was exacerbated by the fact that the British government was unable to formulate clearer demands about what it actually wanted, only asking for significant exemptions that could be sold domestically in areas such as Eurozone governance and the free movement of persons (Beach and Smeets 2019).…”

“…As a result, the institutional network therefore entered the negotiations with a running start, but this meant that the ensuing negotiations would run along tracks laid out by the institutions (Beach and Smeets 2019). This was exacerbated by the fact that the British government was unable to formulate clearer demands about what it actually wanted, only asking for significant exemptions that could be sold domestically in areas such as Eurozone governance and the free movement of persons (Beach and Smeets 2019). During the negotiations, the EU-27 governments were deliberately kept at arm's length, thereby avoiding lowest-common-denominator dynamics that could have been expected to kick in if governmental representatives engaged in extensive discussions in the machine room, especially in free movement issues.…”

“…During the negotiations, the EU-27 governments were deliberately kept at arm's length, thereby avoiding lowest-common-denominator dynamics that could have been expected to kick in if governmental representatives engaged in extensive discussions in the machine room, especially in free movement issues. A major consequence of informal collaboration, in which the Commission worked closely with cabinetlevel officials of the European Council President and the Council Secretariat, was that the Commission showed unprecedented flexibility in doing something it had never done before, where it used Commission declarations in conjunction with the final European Council Decision that contained the promise by the Commission to table three different legislative amendments to allay British concerns relating to free movement of persons issues (Beach and Smeets 2019).…”

Intergovernmentalism and its implications – new institutional leadership in major EU reforms

“…Due to space limitations, we cannot include full in-depth and evidence-based process tracing reconstructions of each case. The empirical reconstructions below are meant to elucidate, rather than substantiate, the theoretical observations, while readers are referred to the separate case studies for extensive documentation (Beach and Smeets, 2019;Nielsen and Smeets, 2018;Smeets et al, 2019, Smeets and Beach, 2019a, Smeets and Beach 2019b.…”