"The European Council in Theoretical Perspectives: The Principals on a Fusion Path"

Since its creation in the 1970s no other institution has formed the European Union so intensively and continuously like the European Council. This “key institution” of the European Union takes nearly all major decisions for the EU and the institutional architecture and has also an academic value as a key body for testing integration related theories. This paper invites to take up and discuss a broad variety of competing classic theories (realism and intergovernmentalism, federalism, neo-functionalism) and theoretical approaches (constructivism, sociological institutionalism and fusion thesis) to characterize and explain fundamental features of the European Council. By mapping this indefinable “locus of power” in a conceptual ream this paper may also contribute to improve the understanding of the evolution of the EU system in general