Everything you need to know about last week's European Council meeting
An interview with Pablo Rasmussen.
With all of this newsletter’s focus on French politics, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that France is a central actor in the European Union (EU), a one-of-a-kind supranational political and economic union. The EU traces its roots to post-Second World War Europe, when leaders sought to foster peace through cooperation, especially between France and Germany. The EU’s institutions, and their relationship with member states, have evolved significantly over time. The onset of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022 served as a grim reminder that armed conflict in Europe remains a reality, and it brought new urgency to the EU’s work.
The European Council, one of the principal EU institutions, met last week, on December 14 and 15. I interviewed Pablo Rasmussen, an expert on European affairs, about the meeting and France’s role. (The opinions he expressed are his and not representative of his affiliated institutions.)
Nikhil: What is the European Council? What is its mandate, who’s part of it, and how often does it meet?
Pablo: Think of the European Council as the strategic direction arm of the EU. It's made up of the heads of state or government of each of the member states. They all have equal votes and equal voice in these settings. And the idea is that the European Council will guide the direction of the EU. It meets five or six times a year, usually for one or two days, and discusses a wide range of topics, from internal EU policies to broad policy issues. The outcome of each meeting is a conclusions document that states the points of agreement, which can then be turned into policy by the EU's other policymaking bodies.
Nikhil: What’s the difference between the European Council, the Council of the European Union and the Council of Europe?
Pablo: That’s always a fun distinction. Nobody ever thought that this would be confusing, but it is. As I mentioned, the European Council consists of the heads of state or government of the EU countries. Below that is the Council of the European Union, which is also called the Council of Ministers (a much better name for it). It’s basically a set of councils, with the ministers from the member states meeting with their counterparts to discuss policy issues. The Council of the EU is the union’s second legislative arm, alongside the European Parliament. It gives all member state governments an equal voice in most votes.
The Council of Europe is completely separate; it’s not an EU institution. It’s made up of more countries [currently 46, compared to the EU’s 27]. It’s older than the EU, and is nominally meant to create peace and stability in Europe, along with standards for human rights and other issues. Nowadays it struggles to reach agreement on key topics because of its disparate membership from countries like Armenia and Azerbaijan, smaller states like Andorra and San Marino, as well as larger states. In addition, its remit has been swallowed by the EU in many policy areas.
Nikhil: What’s the relationship between the European Council and the other EU institutions, especially the Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission?
Pablo: The European Council sits at the top of the institutional structure. The EU is a very democratic international organization, but it’s mostly intergovernmental. It's a relationship between governments, and the highest forum for discussion among governments is the European Council. And so it sits above, setting the strategy. It gets to pick the heads of other institutions, as well as its own president. It doesn’t get into a lot of the nitty gritty politics, but often even when mundane issues like the EU budget get stuck, they’re elevated to the head of state and government level, where a lot of the jockeying, negotiations and horse-trading goes on. The European Council has gotten much more powerful as disagreements between the other institutions have become more salient.
The European Commission is the executive, and the Parliament is a legislative body alongside the Council of the EU. For your readers, it might be easier to think about this in terms of French politics. The European Council is like the French president, and the Commission is like the State. The president sets the direction — which is obviously easier when it's just one person, not 27 plus three, as in the case of the European Council. But like the French president, it provides strategic guidance, and the president of the European Commission is like the French prime minister who executes.
Nikhil: What are the agenda-setting and decision-making procedures of the European Council? What does this mean for the influence of France and other member states?
Pablo: It’s not the most transparent institution. The president of the European Council — currently Charles Michel, a former prime minister of Belgium — is tasked with setting the agenda. That is basically his only job. So the president needs to have good relations with all of the heads of state or government, and he convenes them in small groups. Each president of the Council has their own method. Generally, they begin by having strong relationships with the big member states. Think France and Germany, which always carry a lot of weight, but you also can’t reduce the importance of places like Italy, Poland, Spain. Mostly Western countries, but increasingly, there are intransigent actors, like Hungary, that play a big role by blocking agreement.
The decision-making rule of the European Council is consensus. That's not unanimity, and I think journalists generally write that it’s a body that works through unanimity. For the first time, this Council actually defined the difference between unanimity and consensus [see discussion about Hungary’s role below]. The agenda is designed so that agreement on about 70 to 80 percent is pre-baked, and they spend the rest of the time ironing out the contentious issues and hopefully reaching an agreement, but as we saw this week, that doesn't always happen.
Nikhil: Which member states are France’s “friends” and “adversaries” on the European Council? How do alliances work?
Pablo: It depends a lot on the issues. There are a lot of informal coalitions between the member states. They like putting names to them. France is a leader of the “friends of nuclear energy,” for example. France, Belgium, to some degree the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Finland — these are the pro-nuclear member states. There's no opposing group — no “enemies of nuclear energy” — but if there were, it would include Germany. There are also member states that want more EU-level spending to rebalance the economic weight within the EU, but also to boost the EU as a whole globally. France is a big leader in that. They oppose a smaller, yet very influential group called the “frugals,” which is led by Germany, the Netherlands and some of the Scandinavian countries that want to constrain EU spending. There are a lot of ad hoc configurations like this.
France is very weighty in the EU, so it doesn't have too many enemies, so to speak. There's a need to keep talking to each other, because in the end you're part of the same room, talking about the same topics. An important part of how the Council works is that members can’t disagree too bitterly with someone on one topic, because they might need them on the next.
Nikhil: What were the key outcomes of the December meeting?
Pablo: Ukraine was the headline-grabbing issue in this meeting. There were two priorities on Ukraine: first, to open accession negotiations, and second, to agree on a €50 billion fund to support the Ukrainian economy.
Regarding accession negotiations, Ukraine became an official candidate to join the EU last year, which means that it met some baseline criteria. After that, the next step was to open accession negotiations based on additional criteria. Accession is a long and tortuous process in which they examine every single element of the law in a country to ensure that it aligns with EU law. You have to give credit to the immense amount of work that Ukraine has been doing to adapt its legal, political and bureaucratic systems to EU standards during the war. I don't think there's been a country in many decades, and certainly under the current requirements to join the EU, that has moved so quickly to try to integrate these changes. Still, Ukraine probably didn’t technically meet all of the criteria needed to open the accession negotiations; it was more about sending a political message. There was a desire to give some sort of symbolic acknowledgement to those efforts, and to say that they see Ukraine's future in Europe and, therefore, that an outright defeat on the battlefield is not acceptable to the EU.
On the €50 billion in funding, Ukraine obviously has an incredibly diminished tax base. It already had a pretty bad fiscal system prior to the war, partially because of previous invasions. Since the current war began, it's lost a sizable percentage of its GDP and currently relies on external support to provide basic services to people. Previously, the EU was passing small packages of several billion dollars every two months. Considering that there will be elections in Europe next year, leaders realized that over time it will become more and more difficult to do this every two months, and that they would rather provide a large amount of money at once.
So what happened? Accession negotiations with Ukraine were opened — which was pretty remarkable — but the €50 billion funding package wasn’t approved.
Nikhil: What role did Hungary play, and what are the implications for the Council?
Pablo: I think your readers will know that Hungary is not a well-functioning democracy at this point. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has consolidated a lot of power and taken over the media, the judiciary and much of the bureaucratic state. He uses tax funds coming from within Hungary, but especially EU funds, to support a patronage network of local-level oligarchs, including his family members. Hungary also has deep ties with Russia through personal connections that Orbán has cultivated. Its opposition of EU support for Ukraine is partially rooted in this connection to Russia, but also in its belief that a larger, more geopolitically weighted EU is against its own interests.
Coming into last week’s meeting, Orbán was running a hard line against opening accession negotiations. At the same time, part of the rule of law debate in Hungary has been the EU’s blocking some of the funds it gives to Hungary every year, primarily for violating the independence of the judiciary. Ahead of the meeting, Hungary made some token judicial reforms, although the judiciary is still by no means independent. But these reforms came at a time when Hungary was blocking something the EU wanted — accession negotiations with Ukraine. And so they agreed to release €10 billion in funding and in exchange (and while this is not official knowledge, I think we can agree that it's very likely), Hungary agreed for the accession negotiations to be opened.
How did they agree? The German government was smart to figure out that the treaties establishing the European Council say that decisions are made based on consensus. And so Germany suggested that unanimity isn’t required. Orbán stepped out of the room when this decision was being made, and they voted while he was on a little break. Therefore, consensus had been achieved — it doesn't matter that one of the heads of state and government wasn’t in the room, because he knew what was going on in the room. During that break, he actually recorded a video for social media emphasizing that he strongly opposes Ukraine’s joining the EU. And in the meantime, he basically allowed the vote opening the accession chapter to happen.
Orbán did block the €50 billion of funding, along with part of the EU budget tied to it, but Hungary wasn’t the only country to oppose parts of the EU budget discussion.
Nikhil: What were President Emmanuel Macron’s priorities at the December meeting? Did he get what he wanted?
Pablo: His priorities at the meeting were for the accession negotiations to be opened, and for the €50 billion to be released. He even had dinner with Orbán, which is bad optically, but he invited him with all of the pomp and circumstance that he could. So it was a big priority for this funding to be unlocked.
Macron sees Ukraine's future in the EU as very much tied to his own political legacy. And this is maybe a broader statement about Macron, that he sees himself as a bridge between divided worlds. That's always been his thing, right? His political career began as, “I am the bridge between the left and right. I am neither, and therefore I can bring these two sides together and usher in a new political future.” Geopolitically, he sees himself as the bridge between those who are skeptical of and those who support Ukraine. Earlier in the war, he was speaking with Putin on a regular basis, in the hope that he could prevent the conflict from spreading. He also sees himself as a bridge to bring Turkey on board on certain issues, although his relationship with Turkey has been shaky at best. On the Israel-Gaza war, he has spoken with people representing multiple perspectives.
And so Macron bets his political future on his ability to act as a bridge. His track record on that isn’t perfect, but it's also pretty remarkably good. I think the interesting question is how to make those bridges last, especially in a political cycle with an attention span problem.
“Macron sees Ukraine's future in the EU as very much tied to his own political legacy. He sees himself as a bridge between divided worlds.”
Nikhil: European Council President Charles Michel wrote in his invitation letter, “We must call for all hostages to be released and vigorously address the alarming humanitarian situation in Gaza. We have to be strong in supporting Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself against Hamas, as well as in unequivocally defending international law and international humanitarian law.” To what extent has the EU been able to speak with one voice on the war? How do diplomatic efforts at the EU level relate to those undertaken by member states, particularly France?
Pablo: The EU hasn’t spoken at all with one voice on this issue. At the European Council meeting, they didn’t agree on a single new line of text about the current conflict. I think it was ambitious to think that they could, and probably a miscalculation by Michel to try to push a common line that clearly has not emerged. You can see this in the UN General Assembly votes, in which different EU countries have voted in favor, against or abstained from a wide variety of resolutions.
On Israel and Palestine, there’s never really been a coherent single voice from Europe. There's always been a tacit acknowledgement that a two-state solution is the preferred foreign policy line, but there are disparate approaches as to what that substantively means, how it would come to be, the degree and warmth of the relationship between EU member states and Israel, and recognition of Palestine as a state. This is where you really see that an “EU foreign policy” both exists and doesn't: it exists to the degree that there’s consensus on an issue, and where there isn't, there is no common EU policy. This has been the frustration of both Europeans and non-Europeans for decades.
Macron has his own line of diplomacy — he’s now calling pretty strongly for a truce in the conflict. Over the weekend, UK foreign minister David Cameron and German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock published a joint op-ed in the Times calling for a sustainable humanitarian ceasefire in the conflict. That is a significant step against Israel relative to what both countries have been willing to take before, but it also stands in clear contrast to the French.
My frank assessment — and this is very much my own personal opinion — is that Europe has little to no role to play in this conflict. The most influential EU member state in the current state of affairs is probably Cyprus, due to its geographic proximity and its role as a conduit for aid to Gaza.
“The EU hasn’t spoken at all with one voice on this issue. At the European Council meeting, they didn’t agree on a single new line of text about the current conflict.”
Nikhil: How is the EU addressing pressing issues like terrorism and antisemitism, which have been particularly pronounced in France since October 7?
Pablo: Terrorism and antisemitism are national security issues for the most part, and on domestic, interior policy issues, the EU has effectively no power to create policies. The role of the EU is mostly as a convener: it sets the table for countries to talk to each other. We've seen a couple of high-profile arrests of pro-Hamas and antisemitic terrorism suspects that have been the result of cross-border intelligence sharing. This kind of cooperation became a much bigger deal after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, in which Belgian nationals conducted attacks in France. For a U.S. audience, it's not unlike the law enforcement sharing capabilities between states, although the United States is much more integrated in this way. In the U.S., there's an FBI, but there isn't a European police force.
In France, the situation has been pretty precarious, with a lot of antisemitic acts. But these are national law enforcement questions, without much of a role for the EU.
Pablo Rasmussen is an analyst on European affairs, trans-Atlantic cooperation and climate policy, including in his role as the co-chair for Europe at Foreign Policy for America’s NextGen Initiative. Previously, Pablo researched democracy and disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Before that, he was a policy innovation intern with the European Ombudsman in Strasbourg, France, where he studied transparency in the European Union. Pablo received his A.B. in Government from Harvard University, with a minor in European History, Politics, and Societies. A native Spanish speaker, he’s based in Washington, D.C.
Wading through the thicket of the European institutional structure requires fortitude! This interview is clarifying, posing timely questions and eliciting considered responses. I am better informed today.