The New Intergovernmentalism 10 Years On

By the beginning of the 2000s, integration theory had fallen out of favour as scholars turned to comparative politics and new governance to understand the European Union (EU) as a polity (Hix, 1998, 1994). This period was, in retrospect, one of relative confidence in the European project. A string of ‘no’ votes in referendums on EU policies and treaties, the rise of Eurosceptic challenger parties and the euro crisis shattered this confidence. As the Union's problems mounted, EU scholars were drawn once more to integration theory, with its concern for the EU's ontology and capacity for forward momentum. New intergovernmentalism was part of this new wave of theorising, along with post-functionalism and the core state powers approach (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2014; Hooghe and Marks, 2009). In its original form, post-functionalism posited that public disquiet over the European project was discouraging EU policy-makers from taking major integrationist steps (Hooghe and Marks, 2009). The core state powers approach sees such constraints as being overstated; mass publics in many member states do want the EU to play a greater role in defence, macroeconomic policy and public administration, it points out, even though these policies touch upon the primary responsibilities of states (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2018). New intergovernmentalism sees the EU as pursuing deeper integration despite not because of public opinion (Bickerton et al., 2015b). By avoiding the delegation of new powers to the European Commission, member states have sought to reduce the scope for a backlash from voters and Eurosceptics, but only partially so. The EU's principled opponents, thus, have been growing stronger rather than weaker, new intergovernmentalism contends. Like all attempts at theory building, new intergovernmentalism faced its fair share of criticisms at first (Schimmelfennig, 2015). Over time, however, a growing number of scholars responded to its call for further research on the changing dynamics of post-Maastricht integration. New intergovernmentalism has been applied to a wide range of policies, including asylum policy (Smeets and Zaun, 2021), foreign and security policy (Morillas, 2020), sanctions policy (Szép, 2020), energy (Bocquillon and Maltby, 2020), environmental policy (Catuti, 2022) and competition policy (Bora and Schramm, 2024), the legislative process (Bressanelli and Chelotti, 2016) and the EU's rule of law crisis (Pavone, 2024). New intergovernmentalism has been identified by Verdun (2020) as one of the three strands of intergovernmentalism and by Schmidt (2024) as driving a distinctive phase of integration theory. This article takes stock of new intergovernmentalism 10 years after this approach was proposed. A great deal has happened to the EU in this time, including a once-in-a-century pandemic, Brexit and Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine. These and other changes, we argue, have been aligned with, and in some cases amplified, the integrationist dynamics and institutional politics theorised by new intergovernmentalism. At the core of the new intergovernmentalism is the integration paradox. Whilst demand amongst EU elites for common responses to major contemporary policy challenges is rising, the same actors' preference for empowering supranational institutions has diminished relative to the pre-Maastricht period. As the notion of a paradox suggests, this choice brings tensions that are difficult to resolve. Ten years on, these tensions persist. Covid, climate change and the green transition, migration flows and the war in Ukraine have all led to renewed quests for an expansion of EU policy activity. Member state governments and EU institutions have responded not by delegating significant new powers to the European Commission but by mobilising consensus and exercising ‘collective power’ (Laffan, 2024). What has changed over the last decade is the increasing interconnectedness of EU policy domains, a phenomenon that shows that EU executive institutions are beginning to act like a government. Whereas euro crisis management was narrowly focused on macro-economic stabilisation, the experience showed in hindsight how much the Union's stability as a political system hinges on its ability to mobilise financial resources. The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) not only convinced financial markets that the euro crisis would not be repeated during the Covid-19 pandemic; it also provided nearly €700 billion in EU funding for the green transition, digitalisation, and was used, via the conditionality mechanism, to fight against backsliding on democracy and the rule of law amongst other policy endeavours. Climate action, notably the 2019–2024 European Green Deal package, revived the EU's regulatory agenda whilst cutting across virtually all EU policy sectors. This pattern has been repeated with the EU's response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has ranged from offering temporary protection for millions of displaced people to the recasting of the EU's energy mix and the provision of military support to Ukraine. These policy responses blend traditional and new domains of EU policy-making and provide a prominent role to the European Commission in some cases. Prominence should not be conflated with power, however. The heads of state or government remain firmly in the driving seat. The initial account of new intergovernmentalism was cautious about the relationship between traditional and new domains of EU policy-making. The clearest evidence of European integration's changing dynamics at the time were linked to the new, post-Maastricht, areas of EU activity, in particular, economic, social and employment, foreign and security, as well as justice and home affairs policy (Bickerton et al., 2015d; Fabbrini and Puetter, 2016). Specific research on the rise of the European Council, for example, showed that new areas of EU activity dominated the heads of state and government's agenda (Puetter, 2014, p. 92). Ten years on, new intergovernmentalist dynamics encompass old and new areas of policy-making alike. The original account of new intergovernmentalism was also reticent about drawing a clear line between core state powers and market integration (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2018). Instead, new intergovernmentalism argued that the difference between high and low politics had become blurred (Bickerton et al., 2015a). We see the logic of capacity-building versus rule-making in similar terms. Whilst Genschel and Jachtenfuchs (2025) provide valuable insights into the fraught, intergovernmental politics of capacity-building, rule-making is neither immune from domestic backlashes nor a solely supranational domain. From UK Prime Minister David Cameron's attempt to unpick the four freedoms in his search for a new settlement with the EU to farmers' protests over EU environmental regulation, the Union finds itself in the line of fire whether it is trying to build capacity or not, putting the onus on member state governments rather than supranational institutions to find a way forward. EU executive institutions have become more government-like over the last decade. Their decisions have profound consequences for domestic politics and national economies. They determine the overall policy direction in response to major societal challenges, and they are increasingly preoccupied with questions of war and peace. The 2019–2024 Green Deal package, for instance, consisted of a major set of regulatory and burden-sharing decisions, which have significant redistributive implications for current and future generations and are the subject of intense political conflicts. Through the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism and the RRF and ongoing discussions over a joint fund for European defence (Tamma et al., 2024), the EU has become a resource allocator without which member state governments increasingly find it difficult to achieve key policy objectives. EU institutional politics has adapted to these changes in ways that correspond to new intergovernmentalist predictions, we contend. To its critics, new intergovernmentalism downplayed the powers of the European Commission, which they saw as the ‘unexpected winner’ of the euro crisis (Bauer and Becker, 2014). In hindsight, claims that the Commission won significant new powers through reforms such as the Six Pack, Two Pack and Fiscal Compact were overstated. The EU emerged from this turbulent period with fiscal rules that were just as difficult to enforce and no less dependent on the willingness of member state governments to get their houses in order. The Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure and the European Semester ensured a more fine-grained analysis of national economic policies, but they did not fundamentally alter the balance of power between national governments and the European Commission. The reforms to EU economic governance enacted in March 2024 made little difference in this regard. A key feature of EU institutional politics is that executive power is divided between three institutions – the European Council, the Council and the European Commission – rather than being exclusively exercised by the Commission. As the EU moves from governance to government, the European Council will continue to lead the ensemble of EU executive institutions. Here, we agree with van Middelaar's conception of EU heads of state or government as the Union's ‘collective presidency’ (van Middelaar, 2019, p. 247). The European Council exercises steering and oversight powers vis-à-vis the Commission and the Council. The European Council's growing significance for EU legislative politics was first identified by scholars during the euro crisis (cf. Bocquillon and Dobbels, 2014; Bressanelli and Chelotti, 2016, on the example of EMU reform). It had been a built-in feature of Justice and Home Affairs since the Lisbon Treaty (Maricut, 2016), and it is discernible in negotiations over the EU's Multiannual Financial Framework, over which the EP has found it difficult to exercise its formal powers (Crowe, 2016, p. 22). We expect the European Council's grip on legislative politics to further expand. This implies that the European Council has greater control over the Commission and even possesses the ability to put political pressure on the EP to follow its lead (see section on the EP below). The creation of the RRF was also the product of intergovernmental steering. The Commission's May 2020 proposal for a recovery fund came at the request of the European Council (Tesche, 2022, p. 488). Moreover, the move towards a recovery fund had only become politically possible due to a Franco-German agreement on the issue prior to the presentation of the Commission's proposal. The most important decision on the pandemic fund was taken by the heads themselves at the ‘historic July 2020 European Council meeting’ (Tesche, 2022, p. 481), which lasted four days and nights. The EP had little choice but to accept this deal and a largely informal role in the oversight of pandemic borrowing and lending decisions (cf. Bressanelli et al., 2023). The European Green Deal was an ambitious set of legislative proposals that owed a great debt to the vision and determination of the first von der Leyen Commission (von der Leyen, 2019). However, this major policy response was pursued at the explicit request of the European Council. Consensus on the main policy approach, including the net zero target and burden-sharing, had to be achieved within the European Council prior to the actual negotiation of the individual files by the Commission, the Council and the EP (cf. European Council, 2020). This leads to another feature of contemporary EU institutional politics: the noticeable increase in the capacity of the Commission presidency to tightly control the overall political direction of the Commission and to monitor the work of its services. The presidentialisation of the Commission is not new, but it has intensified over the last 10 years (Becker et al., 2016; Peterson, 2015). Von der Leyen brought this development to a new level (Kassim, 2023). We explain these increased control powers as resulting from the Commission president's role as the interface between an increasingly presidential European Council and the EU's supranational bureaucracy. The Commission president's political standing essentially hinges on her ability to obtain the European Council's consent on major policy decisions. Whilst such political endorsement empowers her within the Commission, she is equally obliged to keep her promises to heads of state or government. In retrospect, new intergovernmentalism could have paid more attention to the empowerment of the EP in the post-Maastricht period. This does not mean, however, that this theoretical approach ignores the growing prominence of the EU legislature, which acquired wide powers of co-decision at Maastricht and beyond. Rather, new intergovernmentalism questions whether these and other reforms amount to or are likely to lead to a full-scale ‘parliamentarisation’ of the EU as a polity (Héritier et al., 2019; Judge and Earnshaw, 2002). The EP remains an extraordinary experiment in transnational democracy, we accept, whilst noting that the European Council remains the EU's ultimate locus of power. Ten years ago, this position was controversial, but it is now been accepted by a growing number of scholars. Theorising the EP's role from a new intergovernmentalist point of view requires an understanding of the rationale behind the EP's In a of contemporary EP and that the EP's development is by and and to it as in a polity of a and of first New intergovernmentalism sees the EP's post-Maastricht empowerment as the of a choice by Member states to have a stronger as they were about the EU's problems in The same however, fundamentally to an institutional in which the EP is its the EP has sought greater powers for itself but the European Council's in for the EU (Bressanelli et al., Bressanelli and Chelotti, 2016). 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