Behind the Scenes: How leaders’ ideas shape EU crisis responses

The Eurozone- and the EU’s subsequent crises of the last decade attributed leadership to European leaders from various countries and institutions. The Covid-19 crisis has further stimulated this process. In EU leadership literature, the leadership polity is characterized as ‘leaderful’ (Muller and Van Esch 2019). The leaderful polity of the EU oftentimes clashed over different ideas concerning both causes and solutions to different crises (Van Esch, 2014; Swinkels, 2019). The literature on how ideas matter in EU crisis management struggles with (1) conceptual and (2) methodological challenges, and we posit they are inherently interlinked. Conceptually, most studies analyze how leaders shape (public) narratives of crisis causes and solutions and convince both the public and negotiation partners ex-post of proposed solutions and measures taken (Schmidt, 2013). These studies restrict themselves to studying the “communicative discourse” of leaders (Swinkels, 2020). This conceptual issue, we argue, is founded in the second, methodological issue: the data availability in studying leader’s ideas in EU crisis management. Studies that examine the role of ideas in EU politics and policy (have to) confine themselves to publicly available, secondary source data such as speeches. However, ideas do not just matter in the “communicative”, public, discourse, but also play an important role in the “coordinative discourse” between leaders resulting in the solutions publicly defended thereafter. The secrecy of crisis negotiations so far prohibits a more thorough investigation of what actually happens in these “coordinative instances” between leaders and getting a hold on ex-post leaders’ reflections on the role of ideas through interviews is close to impossible. However, an important part of understanding the politics of EU crisis management entails that we learn more about the role of ideas in the “coordinative discourse” shaping crises policies. This study is a first step towards overcoming the existing issues in studying the role of ideas in EU crisis management, by deploying new data sources: memoirs of political leaders. Thereby, we gain a direct insight into leaders’ reflections. This can provide us with novel insights into the role of ideas in the “coordinative” discourse. In this paper, we thus argue that an important missing piece of the puzzle to answer the question ‘how ideas matter’ in EU crisis management lies in the reflections and considerations of political leaders themselves. Our question is rather simple: how do EU leaders reflect upon the role of ideas in the “coordinative discourse” of the Eurozone crisis, and how do these perceptions of leaders contribute to our understanding of the role of ideas in EU crisis management? In order to answer this question, we will analyze memoir data of German, Dutch, Greek and Spanish leaders, and in addition those of leaders of the European institutions during the Eurozone crisis. As a result, this study will shed light on the role of ideas in leaderful crisis situations, from the ‘eye of the beholder’. We will overcome the “strategic bias” in ideational studies on the EU and more broadly be able to subject ideational concepts to an empirical test.