Legislating in the shadow of the European Council: Empowering or silencing the European Parliament?

Introduction: “As a result of this trend towards ‘summitization’, the fixation with meetings at which the Heads of State and Government, in a clear breach of the spirit of the Treaties, take more and more decisions themselves and seek to put their stamp even on the fine print of legislation, the Community institutions are increasingly being marginalized”.ii This is how the President of the European Parliament (EP) Martin Schulz recently portrayed decision-making in the European Union (EU): “a state of affairs” he added “reminescent of the era of the Congress of Vienna”. The academic literature has also captured a similar development and, especially (but not exclusively) in the field of economic and monetary policies, has described the European Council as “the political executive of the Union” (Fabbrini 2013, p. 1006) which has come to play “a superior role in relation to the Council and the Commission [...] the heads instruct the relevant Council formation and also the Commission to work towards specific objectives [...] and also to revise proposals” (Puetter 2014, p. 73). In the “new” formulation of “intergovernmentalism”, the role of supranational institutions change: rather than resisting intergovernmental coordination, they “act strategically [...] in a more hostile environment, they avoid putting forward proposals that have little chance of success” (Bickerton et al., 2014, pp. 8-9)