Dealing with the British ‘Re-Negotiation’: New Institutional Leadership in Major EU Reforms

This paper assesses the new forms of collaborative institutional leadership that have developed in the post-crisis era for dealing with major EU reforms. We analyze the case of the British ‘re-negotiation’ that preceded the Brexit. Drawing upon the historical analogy of ‘the Delors model’, we make an analytical distinction between types and levels of institutional leadership. There has been a tendency to conflate the role of political champion played by the Delors Commission in 1991 with the influence of the Delors Commission in 1985. With regard to the levels, we make a distinction between the control room and the machine room and argue that the type of leadership varies with the level at which it is displayed: political championship in the control room versus engineering (‘laying out the tracks’) in the machine room. During the British re-negotiation that stretched from 2015 until the unprecedented February 2016 European Council Conclusions dealing with 'Britain in Europe', the EU institutions engaged in what appears to be a high-level of collaboration. The Commission (and to a lesser extent EP leadership) assisted the European Council President in finding legally consistent solutions that were both acceptable to the EU-27, protected the Internal Market, while also giving the British government enough symbolic 'victories' to try to win the Brexit referendum. This paper analyses the roles played by institutions, asking what roles they played at different levels, and whether the forms of collaboration that have been seen in EMU deepening was replicated in the case of British 're-negotiation', or whether more ad hoc forms of collaboration were utilized.