EuroComment has already published six volumes of Briefing Notes and the seventh is now in progress.
The backbone of the series consists of notes covering every meeting of the European Council, the EU’s highest authority and the core of its system of government. Based on unpublished documents and confidential interviews as well as a large range of published materials, they provide a unique and authoritative insight into decision-making at the top of the EU. Immensely readable, they are also useful for reference purposes long after the meetings that they describe.
Written in the first instance for insiders, EuroComment’s Briefing Notes are also of interest and use to anybody who wants to know how and why the EU arrives at its decisions and what the latter may mean for the future of Europe and the world.
Volume 7 of the Briefing Notes will begin to appear early in June. The following pages provide further information about volume 6.
Herman Van Rompuy’s first European Council as President turned out to be Van Rompuy’s Council. This was in some respects rather surprising, because the Greek crisis hijacked the meeting and reduced the time available for discussion of the Council’s original agenda to little more than two hours. It was precisely the crisis that made both the meeting and the man however. When Angela Merkel rejected the eurogroup finance ministers’ draft declaration barely fifteen hours before the Council was due to begin, Van Rompuy was faced with the prospect of a disaster, both in the Council chamber and on the markets. He therefore mounted a well camouflaged rescue operation. The schedule was altered- ostensibly because of snow in Brussels- and he and his team set about producing a finely crafted statement, which satisfied Mrs Merkel’s political and constitutional reservations, but at the same time offered the Greek prime minister a glimmer of hope. The statement- which Merkel, Papandreou and Sarkozy accepted without amendment on the following morning- was much more than a mere stop-gap solution however, since It redefined the terms of the debate about what could or could not be done and added fresh momentum to the European Council’s increasingly intense discussion about economic government in Europe. Above all, it demonstrated that Van Rompuy was in charge. In a remarkable display of leadership which was totally devoid of charisma, he listened before he acted and led because he had listened. It was not a bad start for somebody who in his own words is ‘still learning’.