Council Negotiations

enlarging policy agenda”. This characteristic of the Council(s), and the central roles of both the Council(s) of Ministers and the European Council in all areas of EU decision making, are the basis for the transformative, as opposed to merely reproductive nature of everyday ‘intergovernmentalism’ in the EU. Council negotiations on all levels today are a far cry from classical, intergovernmental negotiations/ diplomacy, and even from hard intergovernmental bargaining over the distribution of gains from substantive cooperation as envisioned by LI. EU member states do not interact in a vacuum, beginning each new set of negotiations with a tabula rasa. Rather, they act as members of the EU’s ‘executive’ in charge of long‐term governance: “[g]overnments

Rosamond 2000: 147). They are institutionalized, even routinized to an extent that increasingly undermines any clear‐cut distinction of national vs. common/EC/EU interests. The mere fact that member states are members and do participate in a never‐ending string of negotiations means their interests are more than national, as they agree to pay the maintenance price for their ‘negotiation forum’. In the extreme, as the EU becomes ‘the way things are done’, any deal is better than no deal, because only a deal secures the ability to act. Consequently, member states’ respective BATNAs become increasingly irrelevant/less attractive and their win‐sets (Putnam 1988) stretch, because issues are not just linked but also dealt with recurrently until ‘settled’, and the next negotiation always looms. This creates feedback loops from previous decisions (cf. Wincott 1995; see also Pierson 1998) in the multi‐level game that is EU politics (cf. Putnam 1993) on a level distinct from ‘normal’ international exchange. Third, there is mounting evidence that much more than just “hard bargaining” goes on behind Council doors. As Frank Schimmelfennig effectively demonstrates for the case of the decision to enlarge the EU to new member states rather than leave them with the status of associated countries, as LI would have predicted, “community effects on intergovernmental bargaining”, specifically the “community ethos” (idem 2001, 2003), have to be taken into account: “Community actors cannot just bargain, that is, exchange threats and promises, but need to argue, that is, legitimize their preferences on the basis of the community ethos, and to be concerned about their image and credibility as community members”. Thus, arguing can