Transformational Leadership in European Governance: Comparing the Roles of the European Commission and the ECB as Effective Crisis Managers

During the sovereign debt and refugee crises, the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) played central roles as crisis managers. While the ECB was able to act as a strong transformational leader and emerged empowered from the Euro crisis, the Commission was a weak transformational leader and even experienced a subtle disempowerment during the refugee crisis. How can we explain these different outcomes? Complementing recent European integration studies, in this piece we investigate the conditions under which supranational institutions are more likely to act as transformational leaders. Recurring to international relations literature on performance of international organizations and to management leadership literature, we contend that differences in the roles of supranational institutions as effective crisis managers are a function of the following causal mechanisms: material capabilities; scope of the delegation mandate; bureaucratic self-interest motivations; power politics among member states; and lack of consensus on an issue area. The comparison of these two crisis shows that the absence of transformational leadership by supranational institutions might lead to unilateral actions within the European Council and thus lead to an erosion of the integration process.