This paper analyses the role of the EU institutions in setting up the ESM. There have been many scholarly assessments, but remarkably few empirical reconstructions, of the ESM negotiations. Most scholars discuss the coming about of the intergovernmental EFSF and treat the ESM as its logical successor. So far, these reform measures were primarily judged from the perspective of grand integration theories, (new) intergovernmentalism and (neo or post) functionalism, which focussed on the implications on the level of actors (who gained/lost influence) and the outcomes (specifically the intergovernmentalist and supranationalist features of these outcomes). We instead focus on process level dynamics.
We aim to move beyond the headline decisions at the political (i.e. European Council and Council) level, which were extensively covered by the press, and also look at what was going on in ‘the machine room’ (EWG, EFC, Taskforce on coordinated action). In this way, we seek to determine how the EU institutions reacted to the supposed re-intergovernmentalisation of the decision making on European integration. We employ insights from principal agent theorizing, applied to a situation in which there are multiple agents. We analyse the interplay between the European Council presidency, the EWG/EFC and Council Secretariat and the European Commission. We show how they established new patterns of inter- and intra-institutional cooperation to cope with the constraints that were present at the political level. We argue that the institutions were jointly able to provide a different kind of institutional leadership, tailored to the ‘constraining’ environment in which the decision making took place. We trace the origins of this new form of collaborative leadership and discuss its main features.
