From Conductor to Orchestra Member: The Evolution of the Council of the European Union

The Council of the EU (formerly the Council of Ministers) has been at the center of EU decision-making since the earliest days of the European Economic Community. However, the exact nature of its central role has changed dramatically as the EU has evolved. In particular its core function within the EU’s institutional structure has shifted from a nearly autocratic executive tasked with both agenda-setting and decision making to one chamber in a largely symmetrical bicameral legislature with shared decision making and only limited agenda setting capacity. This evolution is less well understood than the development of other key EU institutions, such as the European Parliament – which has been very well studied, in part because the transformation of the Council has been gradual and informal. In addition, the shift toward a primarily legislative function evolved as the result of the addition, and increasing formalization, of a different institution, the European Council. The tendency to merge these two institutions (often generically-and incorrectly-referred to as the Council) derives from the fact that both consist of members drawn from the national executives of the member states. The confusion was facilitated by the very vague language of the treaties themselves, which until the 2009 Lisbon Treaty failed to effectively and definitively differentiate between these two institutions, despite their increasingly disparate roles in the EU policy process. This research examines this transformation through a detailed analysis of the texts of the treaties, as well as additional supplemental materials (archival documents, older academic articles, etc.) and then examines the impact of this transformation on the character of legislative politics in the EU. The research thus speaks to both the development of the EU in particular and the evolution of legislative institutions ore generally.