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Knowing your limits: Informal governance and judgment in the EU

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Abstract

The burgeoning literature on informal governance has shed new light on the workings of international organizations and the hidden rules of the game. The common thrust of these studies is that informal governance is the result of an implicit agreement among states that, in order to sustain cooperation, it can be necessary to accommodate important interests even if this seemingly goes against the organization’s purpose. Struck under conditions of uncertainty, however, implicit agreements such as this are necessarily vague, and their implementation is bound to generate conflicts that threaten to undermine the organization’s legitimacy. How, then, do states decide whether formal rules or informal governance apply? This article uses the case of the EU to propose a solution to this dilemma. The central argument is that member states have delegated the authority to adjudicate on demands for informal governance to the office of the Council Presidency. They mold the legislative agenda such that the government in office can be trusted in its judgment. The plausibility of this argument is illustrated with a description of the Presidency’s historical development and a case study on the negotiation of the EU’s controversial Working Time Directive. Apart from pointing to a missing piece in the literature on informal governance, the study holds more general lessons for the interaction of formal and informal rules as well as the information-providing role of international institutions.

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Notes

  1. The rational design research agenda, for example, focuses exclusively on the “explicit arrangements” (Koremenos et al. 2001: 276) upon which international organizations rest. Informal institutional elements play a more important role in organizational sociology (Meyer and Rowan 1977).

  2. German: Politisches Archiv (AV Neues Amt, Band 7406, 7407), European Union: Council of Ministers (CM2).

  3. Similarly, Kyle Bagwell and Robert Staiger (1990: 780) argue that exceptionally high trade volumes suddenly induce governments to defect unilaterally from a commitment in order to maintain their terms of trade.

  4. Cf. Downs and Rocke (1995: 77) and Sykes (1991: 279).

  5. Today, jointly with the European Parliament. Although the empowerment of the European Parliament defies the credible commitment perspective, it has also never undermined this function.

  6. Here and in the following, the author has translated foreign-language texts.

  7. Ultimately, member states agreed to disagree on this question in a document called the Luxembourg Compromise (European Communities 1966).

  8. Similar models exist for decision-making in the American Congress (Krehbiel 1991), conflict mediation (Kydd 2003), and international organizations (Fang and Stone 2012).

  9. Although less common in international bargaining, the assumption of nearly complete information is a plausible standard assumption in the context of the EU (Garrett and Tsebelis 1996: 280).

  10. I thank Randy Stone and Cosette Creamer for helping me clarify these implications.

  11. Today, the informal “Presidency Handbook” (Council of the EU 2001) states right at the beginning: “The Presidency must, by definition, be neutral and impartial. It is the moderator for discussions and cannot therefore favor its own preferences or those of a particular member state.”

  12. The Council Presidency even managed to retain its influence on the agenda even despite the emergence of rival agenda setters such as the heads of states in the European Council. For that purpose, governments establish contacts with the Commission well before their terms in order to ensure a timely preparation of preferred issues (Wallace 1985: 463). The Presidency also draws on more subtle strategies. In 1986, a confidential British document entitled “Guidance on the Exercise of the Presidency” (cited in Maass (1987: 10)) instructed officials on the respective tactics. A British official defended the document: “Everyone in the community uses the kind of maneuvers or procedures… The only surprising thing is that the British put them on paper.”

  13. Comment of a deputy (cited in Lewis 1998: 364) who assisted in the negotiation.

  14. The Working Time Directive returned to the limelight after the Court ruled in the SIMAP case that on-call duty counted towards total working time (European Court of Justice 2000). Three years later, in its Jaeger judgment, the Court ruled further that on-call duty in a hospital counted as working time even when the worker was allowed to rest when the services were not needed (European Court of Justice 2003). These judgments had dramatic effects on the organization of the provision of health services throughout Europe.

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  1. European Institute, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Mareike Kleine

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Correspondence to Mareike Kleine.

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For comments I would like to thank Cristina Bodea, Sarah Bush, Peter Hall, Bob Keohane, Barbara Koremenos, Andy Moravcsik, Randy Stone, Dustin Tingley, Cornelia Woll, three anonymous reviewers, and the participants of workshops at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the 2012 bi-annual conference of the Council for European Studies, Harvard University, the 2012 Midwest Political Science Association, and the 2012 PEIO conference at Villanova University. The author wrote this article during her stay at Harvard University’s Minda De Gunzburg Center for European Studies as a Kennedy Memorial Fellow.

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Kleine, M. Knowing your limits: Informal governance and judgment in the EU. Rev Int Organ 8, 245–264 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-012-9148-7

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