The Leadership in an Enlarged European Union: The European Council, the Presidency and the Commission

Author: Peter Ludlow

Price £6.50 Publisher EuroComment Publication date 16 May 2005 ISBN 978-9077110096

Publication synopsis Peter Ludlow's latest Briefing Note is concerned with the structure of leadership in the European Union. As Jean Monnet observed, 'nothing is possible without men, nothing is lasting without institutions'. During the past thirty or forty years, the EU has developed a remarkably effective system of collective leadership in and through the European Council which has continued to facilitate the integration process, despite radical changes in the size and character of the EU itself, and the emergence of a generation of leaders whose most prominent figures bear little comparison with their predecessors. The first two sections of the paper analyse how and why the system emerged and flourished. The Dutch and French referenda must, however be seen in part at least as a protest against this system. Representing as its members do both the peoples and states of the European Union, the European Council's legitimacy is not in question. To be as effective in the future as it has been in the past, it must however become more accountable to those in a position to scrutinise, and if necessary discipline its members. This means in the first instance national parliaments and citizens rather than the European Parliament. The constitutional treaty, which must now be presumed dead, had remarkably little of use to say on these matters, largely because MEPs and national parliamentarians in the Convention, either would not or did not acknowledge the European Council's status as 'the highest authority in the Union'. One of the positive features of the present crisis is therefore that it offers a fresh opportunity to find pragmatic, but at the same time radical solutions to fundamental problems which EU orthodoxy has obscured for far too long.

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