Political Leadership in the European Union

Ingeborg Tömmel, Amy Verdun

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351183529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique mondiale

The challenges that have been facing the European Union in recent years have given rise to the question: who leads the EU? This book offers a systematic analysis of political leadership in the EU. This volume offers a theoretical and conceptual analysis of political leadership in the EU. It deals with questions such as what kind of leadership is there in the different domains (such as climate change or central banking). It also examines how various EU institutions (European Commission, European Parliament) exert or have exerted leadership. Furthermore, it examines the role of the presidents of some of these institutions, such as the European Commission the European Council, the European Central Bank, but also of selected national leaders. Although the book does not advance a single leadership concept, the findings of the individual case studies show that the EU is by no means leaderless. The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of European Integration.

Political leadership in the European Union: an introduction

Ingeborg Tömmel and Amy Verdun

ABSTRACT

In light of recent crises in the European Union (EU) there is a need for more systematic analysis of political leadership in the EU, which is what we seek to do in this collection. This introduction offers a theoretical and conceptual background for the volume. Drawing on Burns, Blondel, Elgie, Young, and others, this contribution identifies how political leadership can be analysed in various institutions and institutional settings of the EU. The questions we ask are: what kind of leadership is there in different domains; how and with what tools does political leadership occur and operate in various case studies and how effective have those been? Although difficult to synthesise the results into one overarching leadership concept, or indeed locus, we argue that the individual studies demonstrate that the EU is by no means leaderless.

Introduction

Political leadership in the European Union (EU) is an issue that has attracted less scholarly attention than many other aspects of European politics and governance. This lack of attention stands in sharp contrast to, on the one hand, the extensive research and literature on political leadership in regard to national political systems, and, on the other hand, the obvious need to reflect on and analyse systematically the nature of political leadership in the EU.

The EU, in fact, lacks a clear leadership structure, due to the fragmented character of the European polity. Many leaders and would-be leaders dominate the European scene. Particularly in situations of crisis where swift action is required, the system of fragmented and partly shared leadership hardly works: decisions are taken too late or not at all; if decisions are taken, it is only after lengthy deliberations and negotiations among a host of interested parties and institutions. In the end, it is hard to trace who bears responsibility for them. In many cases, there is also a lack of leadership in the implementation stage of European decisions. In short, the political system of the EU often seems unable or slow to respond to pressing matters. When it must act, it is typically characterised by both a lack of strong and clear political leadership and, at the same time, the abundance of leaders, with none of them clearly in the driving seat.

This specific situation is almost the polar opposite to the exercise of political leadership at the national level. There, highly exposed individuals endowed with authority, such as heads of state or government, chairs of political parties, or other outstanding personalities, fulfil leadership functions in a multitude of ways. Accordingly, there exists a vast literature on political leadership in national contexts, including elaborated theoretical approaches on how to explain the respective phenomena. However, these explanatory approaches as well as the corresponding research findings cannot simply be applied to the analysis of leadership in the EU. Of course, there is also reflection and theorizing about political leadership in international contexts, mostly referring to leaders in intergovernmental bargains. Yet the Union is much more than just an international organisation, so that these theories also do not easily fit. These difficulties may explain why there is so little research into political leadership in the EU.

Against this background, this collection aims at highlighting various aspects of exercising political leadership in the EU through both thorough empirical analyses and theoretical reflections. In this introduction, we first briefly refer to basic theories on political leadership in national and international contexts. Then we present an overview of what has been done so far in theorizing and analysing political leadership in the EU. Furthermore, we summarise the issues and themes, as well as the theoretical approaches, raised in the contributions of this volume and discuss, whether and, if so, in what way these contributions and their findings constitute progress in leadership research. Finally, we formulate a few questions aimed at focusing on possible common denominators or complementarities between our findings and at pointing to the way forward for further research.

Political leadership in national and international contexts

Concepts of ‘leadership’ in national political systems have been widely developed in a range of academic disciplines and numerous aspects of the phenomenon have been considered. In the disciplines of political science and public administration, the groundwork for theorizing leadership was laid by Burns (1978). For him, a leader is an individual who acts in line with followers and their values and motivations. Burns sees leadership as a relationship that enables leaders and followers to take part in a common enterprise. Without the connection to a common goal, there cannot be leadership. Furthermore, Burns differentiates between ‘transactional’ and ‘transforming’ leadership. The former takes place when ‘one person takes the initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of valued things’. The latter is the case when ‘one or more persons engage with each other in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality’ (Burns 1978, 83).

Turning specifically to the study of political leadership, Blondel (1987) seeks to create a universal model of such leadership applicable to all polities. His study focuses on how leadership is an exercise in coercive power. The institutional setting and the personality of the office holder are of importance for successful leadership (see also Blondel 2008). Robert Elgie (1995) looks at the power and motivation of political leaders. He sees political leadership as

… the process by which governments try to exercise control … the extent to which heads of state and heads of government, that is, the individuals who occupy the most prominent positions of authority in the state structure, are able to determine the outcome of the decision-making process. (Elgie 1995, 4)

His comparative analysis of political leadership (presidents and/or prime ministers) in leading countries in the world focuses on institutional settings as main explanatory factors for variations in exercising leadership. He thus provides insights into ‘a process of interaction between leaders and the leadership environment with which they are faced’ (Elgie 1995, 191).

Political leadership is also widely theorized in international contexts. Here the most prominent question is why and how individuals perform as leaders in international bargains, in order to solve collective action problems. Young (1991) for example distinguishes between three types of political leadership in these bargains, which usually work under unanimity rule: structural leadership, entrepreneurial leadership and intellectual leadership. Whereas the first is mostly based on structural power of the leader, for example the power position of his state of origin, an entrepreneurial leader makes use of specific negotiation skills and thus influences the outcome of a bargain. The intellectual leader by contrast ‘relies on the power of ideas to shape the way in which participants in institutional bargaining understand the issue at stake …’ (Young 1991, 288).

In applying these approaches to political leadership in the EU, the approach of Burns appears particularly fruitful for its emphasis on the leader-follower-relationship and also for the distinction between transactional and transforming leadership. The work of Blondel is significant as he points to the concept of power linked to political leadership. Elgie’s approach is likewise important as he draws attention to the institutional context of a leader. Finally Young’s concept of leadership in international contexts is particularly suited for analysing those dimensions of the EU where intergovernmental bargains dominate.

The EU lacks many features of a consolidated polity and strong institutional resources, but it is neither merely an international organisation. Yet it is characterised by a dense web of institutions and informal network structures, as well as various arenas for intergovernmental bargaining, which might in various ways foster or hamper the exercise of political leadership.

Research on political leadership in the EU: the state of the art

How have scholars of the EU conceptualised political leadership so far? Research on political leadership in the EU generally focuses on individual institutions and their leaders: the European Commission and its presidents, the presidencies of the Council and the European Council, individual heads of state or government as well as groups of national leaders, such as the Franco-German tandem.

The most extensively researched leaders are the presidents of the European Commission. Particularly Jacques Delors has attracted much scholarly attention. Ross (1995) and Drake (2000) have delivered a dense description of his successes and failures. Endo (1999) has analysed Delors with an elaborated theoretical framework differentiating between opportunities and constraints in his institutional resources, situational context and personal capacities. Other Commission presidents are hardly researched as individual leaders, but figure mostly in the framework of comparative studies that made use of various approaches. Cini (2008) provided a dense description of the Santer and Prodi Commissions during the ten-year period of their reign (see also Lord 2002). Boucher (2006) elaborated a quantitative analysis of the leadership qualities of all Commission presidents since the founding of the Communities. Tömmel (2013) using Burns’ concept of transactional or transforming leadership has assessed three presidents to find that Delors was more of a transforming leader compared to Santer and Prodi who performed merely as transactional leaders. Most studies reveal that there are vast differences in leadership performance of the Commission presidents; that these differences reflect institutional constraints of the office, differing situational contexts and, above all, variations in personal capacities of the office holders. The theoretical underpinnings of these studies mainly draw on leadership approaches that were first developed for national leaders and then adapted to the context of the EU.

Another set of leaders that has been studied considerably are the presidents of the Council and the European Council. In these studies, which until recently referred to the system of rotating presidencies (Tallberg 2003; Bunse 2009), the primary question focuses on whether these presidencies ‘matter’ in reaching decisions and whether the incumbents were able to use their position for shifting the final outcome of the decision in favour of their own preferences or those of their country of origin (e.g. Elgström 2003; Beach and Mazzucelli 2008; Alexandrova and Timmermans 2013). Tallberg (2006) examines the influence of formal leadership of the rotating presidency in multilateral bargaining in the European Council. He focuses on negotiations using a formal model and testing theoretical propositions based on rational choice institutionalism. The overall conclusion of this research is that the presidencies do matter and that some presidencies are more effective than others in brokering deals. Some scholars in addition emphasise that the office can, under certain circumstances, be exploited in favour of partisan goals of the chair (Tallberg 2006; Schalk et al. 2007; Thompson 2008; Leconte 2012). Most recently, a few studies have explored the role of the permanent presidency of the European Council in facilitating decision-making among its members (Howorth 2011; Dinan 2013).

The leadership role of individual heads of state or government in European affairs is also fairly well researched. These studies revolve particularly around the powerful member states, such as, France, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) (Bulmer and Paterson 2013). Yet these studies are rarely underpinned by explicit leadership theories. Rather, they provide a dense description of which leaders were dominant in which situations and to which extent they were crucial in influencing the outcome of a decision or achieving major integration steps. As for groups of states, the Franco-German tandem and its role as the motor of integration has been of paramount interest (Schild 2010; Krotz and Schild 2013).

Another set of leadership research regarding the EU focuses on the exercise of political leadership in specific situations of the integration process: for example, the negotiations on Treaty revisions, that is, the ‘big bangs’ in European integration, decisions in specific crisis situations, or in negotiations on highly contested issues (Kleine 2007; Beach and Mazzucelli 2008). But also in these cases the leadership function is seen to be linked to certain institutional actors, which take the lead, encouraged by windows of opportunities and also by their regular institutional resources. Occasionally, there are also studies which mainly question the exercise of leadership in the EU, as for example the contributions to the edited volume by Hayward (2008) with the provoking title ‘Leaderless Europe’. Finally, the leadership issue is also touched in broader analyses of European institutions (see e.g. on the European Parliament Judge and Earnshaw 2008).

Besides these explicit studies on political leadership in the EU, there has also been research on the ability of institutions to affect the outcome of integration. These analyses focus, among others, on the Council of the EU and the European Council (Bickerton, Hodson, and Puetter 2015), on the role of the Court of Justice (Bell 2008), or on the leadership of the European Central Bank (ECB) (Grözinger 2014). Other studies emphasise the importance of power elites, policy networks (Kingah, Schmidt and Yong 2016) and institutional structures in shaping European integration. Furthermore there has been quite some research on the role of ideas held by elites (Marcussen 2000; Verdun 2000), advocacy coalitions (Sabatier 1998), business lobbies (Cowles 2001; Van Apeldoorn 2004) and interest groups (Beyers, Eising, and Maloney 2010) on the course of integration. Though this literature is less specific in making the connection with political leadership per se, the insights of these studies for an understanding of how the EU moves forward for instance in times of crisis, and who or which institutions ‘mattered’ in this process, should not be dismissed.

Summing up, we conclude that there is already a certain amount of research on political leadership in the EU, which mainly revolves around the role and function of specific institutional actors and their leadership capacities in an environment of weak institutional resources and varying situational contexts. For a large part, this research is based on a dense description of events and activities; much less attention has been given to political leadership theories.

The guiding questions and contributions

The contributions to this collection in many respects transcend the present state of the art in leadership research on the EU and do so in the following way. The spectrum of issues has been expanded by covering a broader set of institutions – the Commission, the European Parliament and the Eur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Political leadership in the European Union: an introduction Ingeborg Tömmel and Amy Verdun
• 2 Reconsidering Jacques Delors’ leadership of the European Union George Ross and Jane Jenson
• 3 Setting Europe’s agenda: the Commission presidents and political leadership Henriette Müller
• 4 Policy leadership in the European Commission: the regulation of EU mobile roaming charges Michelle Cini and Marián Šuplata
• 5 Leadership in the European Council: an assessment of Herman Van Rompuy’s presidency Desmond Dinan
• 6 The standing president of the European Council: intergovernmental or supranational leadership? Ingeborg Tömmel
• 7 Transforming representative democracy in the EU? The role of the European Parliament Michael Shackleton
• 8 Political leadership of the European Central Bank Amy Verdun
• 9 The paradoxes of legitimate EU leadership. An analysis of the multi-level leadership of Angela Merkel and Alexis Tsipras during the euro crisis F. A. W. J. Van Esch
• 10 Assessing the European Union’s global climate change leadership: from Copenhagen to the Paris Agreement Charles F. Parker, Christer Karlsson and Mattias Hjerpe
• Index