This week we’re looking at decision making within the European Union. How are decisions about how to make decisions made? And what can we learn from these processes about patterns of power in this vital institution?
International organisations have become major players in global affairs, with the European Union standing out as especially powerful. But the EU’s decision-making processes often attract sharp criticism: requiring agreement among many states can cause paralysis, while overriding individual states raises concerns about sovereignty. This episode explores a new study that revisits how the EU has historically grappled with this tension, focusing on two pivotal moments—the Luxembourg Compromise of 1966 and the Paris Summit of 1974. The findings challenge long-held assumptions about the (in)effectiveness of decision making in the EU, and offer fresh insights into how the EU really works.
Alan Renwick is joined by Dr Jonathan Golub, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading, and our very own Dr Michal Ovádek, Lecturer in European Institutions, Politics and Policy here in the UCL Department of Political Science.
Mentioned in this episode:
Alan Renwick: [00:00:00] Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we are looking at decision-making within the European Union. How are decisions about how to make decisions made, and what can we learn from these processes about patterns of power in this vital institution?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. International organizations have in recent decades played a vital role in world affairs. None has been more powerful than the European Union.
Yet how such organizations, not least the EU, make decisions is often sharply criticized. Their need for agreement among member states is said to lead to indecision and stasis. On the other side, the inability of individual states always to get their own [00:01:00] way is seen as violating sovereignty.
The EU itself has long struggled to balance the competing costs and benefits of decision-making by unanimity and by qualified majority. A new study sheds light on decision-making about how to make decisions in the European Union. It takes a deep dive into two episodes from half a century ago, the Luxembourg Compromise of 1966 and the Paris Summit of 1974. Its analysis suggests a need to revisit old assumptions about how the EU functions.
I'm delighted to say that the authors of that study join me now. They are Dr. Jonathan Golub, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading, and Dr. Michal Ovadek, Lecturer in European Institutions, Politics and Policy in the UCL Department of Political Science.
Welcome, Jonathan and Michal, to UCL Uncovering Politics. Let's start [00:02:00] with a bit of background.
Jonathan, in simple terms, how are decisions made within the European Union?
Jonathan Golub: In simple terms, you look at the treaty. The member states signed a treaty and when they want to pass laws. They specify in the law, which bit of the treaty applies, and you either have unanimous voting or you have qualified majority voting, depending on the sort of law that is being proposed. Officially, that's how it's supposed to work.
Alan Renwick: What is qualified majority voting?
Jonathan Golub: So bigger states have more votes than small states, but not as many as you might suspect. Belgium has fewer votes than Germany or Italy, or France. But, nowhere near based on the size of the countries, you would think based on the size, Germany would have a hundred votes and Belgium would have three or four.
But it's much more equal than that. So, big states have more votes than small states, but small states are quite overrepresented in the system. That's majority voting, unanimous voting is one country, [00:03:00] one vote, officially.
Alan Renwick: And the qualified majority means not just voting, but also a certain threshold to pass for a measure to get through.
Jonathan Golub: Yeah it's roughly five. Seventh of all the combined votes is a qualified majority. It should be easier to adopt something under a qualified majority system than a unanimous system.
Alan Renwick: And various institutions within the European Union are all involvedin the decision-making process.
Is it the same process of making a decision that is used in each of those institutions?
Jonathan Golub: No, we're talking about the final step where it's being adopted. The way things are proposed to the council, which is where the heads of the government, the foreign ministers are, is a different system.
And we are focusing really on the final step, when you're going toadopt a law? Is it by unanimous voting, or is it by majority voting at that stage?
Alan Renwick: Michal, do you want to add to that picture of how decisions are made?
Michal Ovádek: There is a double rule in the qualified majority system nowadays, we are looking at both a strengthened majority.
So it's not just a simple majority. It's more than half of the member states [00:04:00] have to vote in favour in the council. In addition to that, there's the component which Jonathan also mentioned, which has to do with the size of the member states; more populous member states have more weight in the council and it's easier for them to block decisions.
Alan Renwick: Jonathan, you started your answer there by saying that officially, this is what we do. We look at the treaty, which kind of sounds as if there's a further story to be told here about how things work in practice.
Jonathan Golub: The underlying conclusion of most work on the European Union, is that the formal rules don't matter in practice. That in fact, even if you had majority voting as the treaty specifying majority voting as the decision rule. In practice, everyone seems to think it was de facto unanimity. Any individual state, whether big or small, could object and effectively slow things down or block things. We test that view, and I think we reject that view.
Alan Renwick: I guess that [00:05:00] view feeds this idea of the EU as a sclerotic institution incapable of making decisions because it's just so difficult to get this kind of agreement that is necessary to make a decision.
Michal Ovádek: That's exactly right. There’s this narrative about the EU being incapable of making decisions, especially in the 1970s. One of the motivations behind the paper is to look into how much truth there is to these narratives. What is narrative, what is fiction, and what is actually, what is the cold hard data tell us?
Alan Renwick: How unusual is the EU as an international organization in terms of its decision-making processes?
Michal Ovádek: So on paper, there are many organizations similar to the EU, in different parts of the world, which share many similarities with how the EU was originally set up in the 1950s. In practice, none of these organizations has come anywhere near close to what the EU has become or how the EU functions and the level of integration that the EU has managed to achieve for the European continent.
There's a massive discrepancy between the practical effects of the EU and [00:06:00] really how it works and what it managed to achieve compared to many organizations that would try to mimic that maybe to some extent, but failed for different reasons.
Jonathan Golub: I think there are also parallels at the international level.
Most people will be familiar with the United Nations and the Security Council where there is, a majority voting system, except that the five biggest permanent members have a veto. Likewise, the International Monetary Fund officially has a voting system, but a lot of these organizations work by consensus. The dominant narrative in the EU is likewise that it was all consensus. The vote didn't matter in the European Union. It was all consensus, just like we see in other international organizations. Our research challenges that and says the whole consensus idea is greatly overblown. The majority rules had a much bigger effect than people seem to think.
Alan Renwick: What's at stake here in this choice between the unanimity rule and the qualified majority rule?
How does it make a difference to outcomes?
Michal Ovádek: [00:07:00] Conceptually, the differences between whether the states are negotiating a law in the shadow of other states being able to block that law, or whether they're negotiating in the shadow of there being a possibility of taking a vote and the majority, or the qualified majority prevailing. Concretely, there are different policy areas in the EU governed by different procedural rules. For example, nowadays, rules on taxation are still subject to unanimity. Meaning that if the EU wants to regulate matters of direct taxation, it will require all the member states to agree to that law for that law to pass. Which makes it difficult, because you need to obtain the agreement of all 27 member states. In contrast, rules such as regulatory rules on the internal marketcan be passed using a qualified majority, which makes it much easier to pass them. Which also creates incentives for the EU, to frame laws according to different policy areas.
Alan Renwick: So, there's one aspect here that is around simply the ease of making decisions, and I guess obviously, the closer you need to be to unanimity, the [00:08:00] harder it is to reach a decision. It sounds like there's also a story around who has power and what the kind of distribution of power is under these different rules.
Is that important for us to understand as well?
Jonathan Golub: Historically, if there is a consensus that even small states, if they wanted to, they could put their foot down and say, I don't agree, I'm not part of the consensus. And they would slow down or outright block laws.
The narrative seems to be, even small states could wield this power and claim the need for consensus was quite dramatic. You don't have that in any other international organization. The idea that Belgium, or even Luxembourg or the Netherlands, would single-handedly block a policy on agriculture, for example, that other countries have a majority, but it just doesn't pass.
So, the stakes are high, the bigger states have more votes, but the narrative is that even the small states could block things under the consensus, which would be remarkable if that's how it worked.
Alan Renwick: Okay, great. So, we've got a [00:09:00] sense of how the EU works, how decision-making works, and why this matters, why this is, maybe feels a little bit dry in terms of voting procedures, but it's incredibly important for how this major institution functions.
Let's move on then to the study itself. Jonathan, what are you asking in this study? What's the driving question that shapes what you're doing?
Jonathan Golub: The driving question is whether states can get together at an international summit and change the way the decision rules work. You get together at a meeting, and you make an announcement, and say we're going to do things differently.
We're no longer going to operate by this consensus. We are going to go back to the way it should work: majority voting. The project investigates whether this summit effectively had any real impact on the decision-making process in the 1970s.
Alan Renwick: We have the Treaty of Rome passed in 1958. Then you were [00:10:00] saying that during that initial period from 1958 up to 1966, the EU was functioning along the lines of the treaty in terms of some matters being decided by unanimity, some matters being decided by qualified majority.
Is that right? But then the first of the points that you focus on in the article, the Luxembourg Compromise comes across in 1966 and changes that, am I getting that right?
Michal Ovádek: Yes. It's a little bit complicated because between 1958 and 1970, almost the entire EU is going out of the European Economic Community (EEC), as the EU was known back then. They were going through a sort of transitional period. So, it was just set up. The procedural rules are still in flux to some extent because the founders of the treaty, the member states, envisaged that there would be some difficulty setting everything up.
They give themselves some extra time, especially for the qualified majority rules to kick into place. And so that's one of the issues that frames that, that's in the background of the Luxembourg Compromise. And the empty chair crisis precedes this compromise.
Alan Renwick: Do tell us what the empty chair crisis is.
Michal Ovádek: [00:11:00] Absolutely. In June 1965, the French delegate, a high diplomat of France to the EU who sits in the council, who makes decisions on behalf of France, who votes on behalf of France decides to walk out on the orders of Charles De Gaulle, then the President of France.
He doesn't return for the next six months. This is why we call the empty chair crisis because one of the chairs around the table in the council is proverbially empty, because the French delegate is missing, which of course complicates the decision-making of the EU.
But the rest of the member states buckle down and carry on, and they try to weather this crisis and just hope that this can be resolved, and it eventually is resolved in the Luxembourg Compromise of 1966.
Alan Renwick: What does the Luxembourg Compromise do?
Jonathan Golub: Depends on who you ask. That is one of the most contested things that we study. Anyone who's done any work on the European Union, the first thing you learn, lecture number one, is that the Luxembourg Compromise, the French won. The French wanted to prevent majority voting from taking effect. [00:12:00] Other member states weren't happy about it, but they effectively gave in to France one and that for the next 20 years, majority voting didn't really have any effect. That's what everyone seems to think.
Alan Renwick: So I'm just getting this history right in my head or I'm trying to, at any rate, if I understand correctly, qualified majority voting is allowed for in the treaty in 1958, but they're not using it very much because there's this transition period into that and the Luxembourg compromise is saying: no, we're not going to transition into that. We're going to apply an informal norm that says, no, we're going to maintain a standard of unanimity.
Jonathan Golub: Yes, in 1965, 1966, instead of having this explosion of qualified majority voting, we will just effectively have consensus and de facto in practice unanimity. That carried on until the mid-seventies, where there was a summit and that summit said, “let's revise and get rid of and renounce that old agreement and go back to the way things should have worked with majority voting.”
Alan Renwick: Okay. That's the Paris Summit?
Jonathan Golub: That's the Paris [00:13:00] Summit.
Alan Renwick: The 1974.
Yes. Okay. Just getting it all in our minds.
Fantastic. What you're trying to understand is what the impact of each of these informal decisions is upon actual decision-making processes, and I guess, in my mind, I'm thinking that should be easy. It should be obvious what decision-making processes were used.
We can see the record, we can see how many people, how many countries agreed to different decisions. But it's way more complicated than I imagined?
Michal Ovádek: The main difficulty here is in observing the decisions. What it actually means when we see countries vote in favour of a decision, right?
We do not have detailed access to the negotiations underlying the decisions on individual laws, which makes it difficult for us to ascertain exactly the kinds of dynamics and whether the countries are essentially deciding under the shadow of a veto or a shadow of a vote. This is the key difference that we are interested in.
Alan Renwick: Shadow of a veto means unanimity ruled, e.g., every country can veto. Instead, a vote means [00:14:00] they will vote on using those qualified majority rules.
Michal Ovádek: Precisely. You can imagine how this would shape the negotiation dynamics significantly because if any one member state can end up blocking a decision that's going to change how you bargain, that's going to change how, what kind of demands you might have in the negotiations are going to change what the content of the decision looks like at the end of the day.
Whereas if no single member state can block a decision, that there can be a vote and you can overrule these sort of blocking minorities, small ones that changes what will end up in the decision, even if everyone agrees formally, right? Everyone could come together at the end andsay, “Oh, we all agree”. It matters for the content of the decision whether one rule or the other rule applied. This is central to any decision-making system.
Alan Renwick: What evidence are you looking at to ascertain that?
Jonathan Golub: It's important to note that the evidence is not available in the sense that if you looked at the British Parliament, everyone votes, and you can just see who voted for what.
Alan Renwick: Yeah.
Jonathan Golub: In the 1970s and the 1960s, there was no such [00:15:00] data. There are recollections of how often votes took place.
Everyone seems to agree that actual votes were quite rare. But as anyone who's made a group decision knows, if there's the possibility of a vote, then you don't need to force the vote. Like in our paper, we talk about nuclear weapons. You don't need to use nuclear weapons to have an effect like nuclear weapons.
The shadow of the vote is unobservable. All you can do is look at the decision-making pace, for example, what was adopted, what wasn't adopted. You know what the formal rules were, but you're not going to be able to observe the actual vote. What we're trying to get at is. If there were a threat of a vote, what would we see? And if there was no effective shadow of the vote, if it was a veto, what would we see? And that's the sort of evidence that we gather.
Alan Renwick: Say a little bit more specifically, what is the evidence that allows you to differentiate?
Jonathan Golub: For example, we look at the pace at which laws are adopted under different rules.
If there [00:16:00] was a shadow of the vote, we would expect decisions to be a lot easier to take under a majority system. And if in fact, they are much easier to take and they get adopted much faster than under unanimity, we would count that as evidence that's consistent with a shadow of a vote. And the formal rules working.
Alan Renwick: Ah, okay. And can we be confident that you're right in your categorizations here?
Michal Ovádek: We certainly hope so. I think what placed our advantage is that we look at different types of evidence. We have systematically gone through the archives to retrieve as much material as possible on the decision making at the time.
We have both qualitative stories, people working in the commission in the council, in the institutions at the time, talking about the events, how frequent they think, the, qualified majority vote blockage is, how frequent the application of the Luxembourg compromise is, whether they can use the developments the political developments, right?
The summits, such as the summit of 1974, to their advantage. But we also look at the sort of quantitative evidence and we compare, [00:17:00] legislation or decisions made which were similar before the event happened and after the event happened. We have a certain hypothesis about the effects of that event.
We can see whether these decisions essentially change right before and after, because we closely track within different policy areas as well.
Alan Renwick: Okay, so let's move on to the findings. The general understanding among insidersin the European institutions has been that the Luxembourg Compromise worked and led to a continuation of unanimity voting and then the Paris Summit didn't work in that unanimity voting continued.
Your findings are rather different. What do you find?
Jonathan Golub: We expected that this summit in the seventies, the Paris Summit, would change a lot of things. If there was this paralysis in the 1960s and if there was great concern to speed everything up, and then there's a big public statement, let's speed things up, [00:18:00] let's get rid of the Luxembourg Compromise.
We thought this was going to work. Everyone's worried about speeding things up, and we found that it did not affect the speed. Superficially, this would seem to confirm what everyone has been saying about the European Union. The majority voting just never works when, in fact, what we found majority voting worked before and after the Paris Summit.
There was a blockage to renounce. One of the main findings is that the formal rules seem to work before and after. Despite what everyone believes about the European Union. The second fascinating thing is if the formal rules were working both before and after, why was there so much anxiety?
The official statement by delegates at high-level officials was that things aren't working, but yet they were working. They seem to be working on both qualitative and quantitative evidence, yet the heads of state felt the need for the summit. They thought that things could be more efficient, and we no solid answer for why they thought that.
Alan Renwick: That's the [00:19:00] question I was just about to ask.
Michal Ovádek: I think it's one of the more fascinating things to keep investigating that comes out of our paper, which is this discord between certain kinds of narratives that take hold in societies or maybe in the public consciousness, or maybe just among a group of elite officials.
Such as in this case, how it's possible for these narratives to essentially divert from the data, from the official record, once you study that record systematically. So, I think the contribution of the paper is that we look at the data systematically and we see that, we don't see evidence for this narrative, but it is a separate and interesting question of how the narrative took hold in the first place. How is it possible for so many people to buy into this narrative and, have almost fictional recollections of things that did not happen.
We simply do not see any archival or evidence in the data.I think we probably need a separate study on that topic.
Alan Renwick: I guess I'm wondering if there's some kind of strategic reason why it would be in the interests of people in the governments to argue that they're subject to greater constraint in [00:20:00] terms of the ability to reach decisions than they are.
It’s quite useful sometimes if you're in power to emphasize your powerlessness because then you can't be blamed for things, and maybe there's an element of that going on.
Jonathan Golub: It would be a bold politician who came back and said, we have been outvoted. This is a normal occurrence.
Or at least we could have been outvoted. So, we had to make concessions. It is unlikely that politicians are going to trumpet that. But if that's the case, what's the point of having a summit with a big announcement that you're going back to the voting? We have no great answer for that. And that needs further research, but below the surface seems that lower-level diplomats, technical experts in all these various fields, were responding to the rules the way you would expect
Alan Renwick: And did I pick up from the paper that there's a difference depending on what kinds of decisions you're looking at, there are directives, regulations and decisions. And the directives do show higher levels of [00:21:00] unanimity affecting or at least, the shadow of the veto, to use the language that you've been describing.
Jonathan Golub: The formal rules for directives are quite often unanimity. So that's not a shadow of a veto that is formal. The reason that things took a long time in the 1970s to get adopted if you're making directives, harmonization of vehicle standards and food standards, a lot of those things didn't get adopted in the seventies, but it had nothing to do with a Luxembourg Compromise or a consensus.
It had to do with, these were not subject to majority voting. They were subject to unanimity. As you would expect, they took years and years to get it approved. And so directives, which may be the most complex or the most difficultwere rarely, maybe 20%, 25% of the time, subject to majority voting.
Alan Renwick: But that's not part of the stories that is relevant [00:22:00] to why people are having this misguided perception.
Michal Ovádek: To some extent, it is from the perspective of the existence of unanimity voting for many policy areas at a time would slow things down in general, right?
It would make the EEC or the EEU seem more paralyzed. However, the story extends beyond that, right? And the story says, actually, the received narrative is about the qualified majority voting being superseded by the Luxembourg Compromise, which effectively says, oh, everything is now subject to some form of a veto. We push back against that part of the narrative. We are not saying that the formal rules on unanimity did not apply. That's not what we're saying. They certainly did apply, and that's why we can observe this difference in the speed of adoption between decisions made under unanimity and decisions made under a qualifying majority.
Alan Renwick: Okay, we're coming to the end of our time and I guess we should think about why does all of this matter,maybe some of our least charitable listeners could be thinking, they've been talking [00:23:00] for the last 20 minutes about a decision made in a summit in Paris more than 50 years ago. Why should I care about that?
Jonathan Golub: We should care because governments want to make laws. To do that, they set rules. And if you want to know whether it's easy or hard to make those rules, and whether states can block collective decisions, you must look at the rules and see whether the rules work.
The big story of our research is we ask whether the rules set by governments to get things done, whether those rules work or not. I think that has quite dramatic implications within the EU and for other international organizations. If you want to get stuff done and you set up rules to make it easy. Do they work or do they not? Are they paralyzed by a form of consensus?
Alan Renwick: You're suggesting that there's reason to think that the pattern we see in this case is one that we [00:24:00] should expect to generalize to other cases. The finding that the formal rules mattered here rather than these informal decisions the leader has attempted to make in subsequent meetings. That is a pattern that it is reasonable to expect, based on your findings, to see in other cases as well.
Michal Ovádek: That's right. I think it makes sense that we would expect that to happen also in other cases because, in many instances, whenever governments do seek more efficient rules to, make things happen on the international state, and we might think of many international challenges where we would expect it to happen or hope to happen, right?
If we can see these international cooperation problems that are crying out for more efficient procedures to get things done. However, if it turns out that it's really easy to override these rules just a couple of years down the line using an informal agreement, that would be quite concerning.
But in fact, our paper shows that maybe it is not that easy to override formal agreements using informal decisions. So [00:25:00] for the formalists out there, this is a good story.
Alan Renwick: Jonathan?
Jonathan Golub: I would agree up to a point. I think that if majority voting rules in different organizations work the way we think they work, that's good news.
But there's also a possibility that this makes the European Union a unique case. If it’s the most developed institution in the world and it works and it has formal rules that work this way, maybe it is different from the UN or the IMF which would be quite fascinating in and of itself.
Alan Renwick: Yeah, that's interesting because when I'm listening to you, I'm thinking in the current context of today, the rules based international order is not feeling especially healthy. Whereas you're suggesting that actually rules do matter and rules do constrain decision makers. But maybe it's that the EU is a particular kind of institution in which, this kind of rule-based process is more deeply embedded and therefore we can be learning about, what are the [00:26:00] structures that enable this kind of, rule-based way of making decisions to become more consolidated.
Jonathan Golub: Yes, the EU could be special in a good way, in that rules to get things done, work better than they do in other international settings.
Alan Renwick: This has been a very heartening conversation. Thank you so much both of you, Jonathan and Michal. I love it when we delve deep into a bit of history that political scientists, most of them have long forgotten, and we discover valuable lessons for the present day. So, it has been great. Thank you so much.
We have been discussing the article, Informal Procedures, Institutional Change, and EU Decision-Making, Evaluating the Effect of the 1974 Paris Summit by Jonathan Golub and Michal Ovadek, which is currently available for online early access in the Journal of European Public Policy.
And as ever, we'll put details in the show notes for this episode. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you [00:27:00] need do is subscribe.
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