Governing the European Union, by Michele Boselli

3. Intergovernmentalism as the key feature of the building of the EU

Intergovernmental organisations allow their member states to pursue their national interests and exercise the power of veto on policies that they don’t agree with, in other words any decision has to be taken unanimously. The concept of Intergovernmentalism is therefore opposed to that of supranationalism: supranational organisations limit the possibility for member states to exercise such power of veto and oblige them to accept decisions taken by the majority, or a qualified majority (QMV), of the other states participant in the organisation. In order to address the question whether intergornmentalism has been and remains the key feature of the building of the EU, we must look back at its beginning in the years after the second world war, where we find several examples of international organisations which can help us to better understand the concepts of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism. One such organisation is the Council of Europe (not to be confused with the European Council, an institution of the EU) which is a perfect example of an intergovernmental organisation comprising 38 member states, not necessarily members of the European Union.

Another typical, explicitly intergovernmental organisation is the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA) a trade-based organization set up by some European countries (such as the UK, traditionally supportive of the intergovernmental approach) as a response to a partnership of the type of the European Communities, which they felt was too binding. The first of these was the European Coal and Steel Community, established in 1951-52, in order to share the management of these resources among the six participant countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. By doing that, they agreed to a certain degree of supranationalism: the policies in that particular sector would be carried out by an independent body. In the words of Nugent: “the ECSC was the first of the inter-state organisations to possess significant supranational characteristics”.

Other areas of common interest among those six countries were also placed under the governance of similar communities in the 1950s, namely the one on nuclear power (Euratom) and the European Economic Community (EEC), and in the 1960s the three communities were merged into a single institution, the European Communities (EC), which now constitutes just one of the three pillars of a wider and deeper European Union, the one pillar that over the decades became remarkably supranational, ehile the other two are strictly intergovernmental: the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Justice and Home affairs (JHA). As we can see, while it is certainly true that intergovernmentalism has been the key feature at the beginning (the most significant step in EU development were taken by means of Intergovernmental Conferences), it is not correct to say that it remains the key feature. A more appropriate and balanced assertion would be that of Heffernan: “the making of the EU has been an uneasy compromise between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism”. Indeed, over the decades the EU has been transformed from a strongly intergovernmental organisation with just a supranational hint to a considerably supranational organisation with federalist ambitions.

Among the major institutions of the EU, while it is incontrovertible that the intergovernmental European council (made up of the prime ministers and the foreign affairs’ ministers) is “the most important European institution in determining the pace, strategic direction and feasibility of integration” (Heffernan), on the other hand the introduction of the QMV has been a significant step towards supranationalism. At the same time, more power has been granted to the main supranational institutions, the Commission and the Parliament, and a particularly strong case for supranational advocates is offered by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which through its deliberations established the principle that the community legal order has supremacy over national law. The Court is not competent on policies regarding the second (CFSP) and third (JHA) pillars, but several JHA policies have already been moved from their traditional (and intergovernmental) place in the third pillar into the first one, the Community pillar, so that the Court will have jurisdiction, argues Wincott against the intergovernmentalists’ vision that community law is under control of the member states acting intergovernmentally and subsequently the ECJ would have been a subordinate subject controlled by the member states. Sure, the major breakthroughs of the Union (the founding and subsequent Treaties) are basically intergovernmental agreements of a confederal nature, as opposed to the federal concept in which states surrender sovereignty, but “somewhere between retaining and losing sovereignty, states can establish supranational organisations” (Bromley).