Bridging the gap - intergovernmentalism and Coreper

The discussion on deep systemic changes conventionally focuses on the European Union’s (EU) lead institutions and the balancing of intergovernmental and supranational influences. An indicator of systemic change which may be easily overlooked is the altered role of bridge institutions, which facilitate the relationship between the EU’s lead decision-making bodies. The most central actor in this regard is the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper). The scholarship linked to the new intergovernmentalism and approaches on foreign and security policy-making had identified a reduced role of Coreper as a consequence of the emergence of privileged senior policy committees, such as the Economic and Financial Committee and the Political and Security Committee in the post-Maastricht period. These committees acted as bridge actors between the European Council, the Council, and the Commission in new areas of EU activity. Based on new interview data this paper argues that this trend has been partially reversed and that there is evidence of a rise of Coreper to new prominence as the lead forum for three-way negotiation between the European Council, the Council and the Commission. The forum even should be considered to be part of the EU core executive (Puetter and Terranova 2025). The paper plots new theoretical ground by explaining the rise of Coreper by three interconnected dynamics. First, there is a gap in EU intergovernmentalism, which is constituted by the institutional separation of the European Council and the Council. While historically this separation was meant to inject new impetus into the integration process by diverting power away from the technocratic community institutions, and thus the Council, the ambition of the European Council to control policy, rather than only the broad developmental path of the Union, is partially at odds with this separation. Second, prominent EU policy responses have become bolder and more cross-sectoral in recent years. These include policy challenges such as Covid, Ukraine, climate change, and geopolitics more broadly. Third, while new areas of EU activity, notably economic governance during the euro crisis, dominated the immediate time after the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the cross-sectoral character of many contemporary policy challenges and the growing politicisation of classical domains of EU single market integration (Hodson and Puetter 2025) have strengthened the role of the Commission in the policy-making process while equally increasing the desire to uphold intergovernmental control of these policy processes. Even though the latter dynamic seems to suggests a contradiction in terms, it implies in practice a greater proximity of all three lead EU executive institutions. Because of the formal separation of these three political institutions there is an increased demand for a central, cross-sectoral actor, being able to bridge that gap.