Intergovernmental Negotiations in the European Union: Strategies and Power
Abstract
More than six thousand meetings take place each year in the framework of the Council of the European Union (EU). The objective of many of these meetings is to prepare meetings at the highest level: between Ministers and Heads of State and/or Government. As the relevance and importance of these meetings is undisputed, there is a growing literature that analyzes different aspects of these negotiations. The aim of this article is to review this literature starting from two major questions: The first refers to the strategies used by different Member States in the negotiations. In short, how do states negotiate in the EU? Which states opt for cooperative strategies and which ones for conflictive strategies? Building on the literature, the article derives a number of factors that can determine the choice of strategies: the shadow of the future, domestic preferences, power, culture, level or stage of the negotiation, the subject area and Euroscepticism. The second question is to analyse which states have most power in these negotiations. Various factors appear in different studies to explain the distribution of power: voting power, institutional power, structural power, the characteristics of the negotiators, the BATNA of countries and coalitions between countries. Building on this review of the literature, the article presents some conclusions and some ideas for future research.
Received: 19 May 2016
Accepted: 28 June 2016
Published online: 31 October 2016
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