When ‘NIMBY’ becomes Chefsache Agenda setting and control of the EUCO beyond the immediate crisis

After a decade of more or less continuous crises in the EU, there have been many individual analyses of how the European Council (EUCO) and its support structures (EUCO system) have responded to each individual crisis. There have been far fewer assessments of what happened after the immediate crisis phase has passed. What originated as a series of one-off responses to the Eurozone and migration crisis has since transformed into new modes of governance. Moreover, this ‘crisisification’ (Rhinard, 2019) or ‘crisis-oriented governing mode’ (White, 2020) has transcended crisis-related policy-areas, and is also permeating ‘regular’ areas of policy-making. This paper provides a systematic assessment of the EUCO system’s ability to shape and steer policy-making beyond a crisis. The paper analyses the EUCO’s system’s ‘secondary response’ to the EU energy crisis, specifically how it tried to protect and support key European industries, faced with high energy costs, and related to this, the massive US subsidy scheme that is IRA. The leaders themselves continued to make a priority about supporting (clean) European industries, a.o. through easier permitting rules for renewables, facilitating the extraction and recycling of critical raw materials, and safeguarding crucial net-zero technologies. Yet, many claim that once such a dossier leaves the table of the leaders, the normal ‘NIMBY’ procedures kick back in, and not much happens. This paper traces the EUCO’s involvement on energy and industry from the February 2022 Summit in Versailles until now, thereby addressing the question of how does EUCO involvement ‘trickle-down’ into the rest of the EU machinery? Or, conversely, if its demands are not acted upon, where, when and why the process grinds to a halt? This provides us with a deeper understanding of how the EUCO and EU systems deal with major, horizontal policy challenges, when they are no longer headline, crisis decisions