The European Council as a crisis driven ‘gouvernement économique’

Introduction: High on the agenda of the European Council as the key institution within the EU’s architecture are issues of economic governance. The various policies that form part of economic governance – monetary, fiscal, and other economic and social policies – are usually regarded as the most important or at least the most often discussed areas of the European Council’s policy-making (see for example Van Rompuy 2010). Following their problem-solving instinct, since the 1970s, the Union’s political leaders have regularly and extensively used the European Council to cope with economic challenges that the European states were faced with. The performance and profile of the European Council in this area is difficult to capture. The term ’economic governance’, used by the European Council itself (for example March 2011) , is only useful for a first general orientation as this policy field is characterised by a confusing array of institutions, processes, mechanisms and instruments (Begg 2011: 337-339). To consider the European Council’s performance in the economic realm, this paper takes a closer look at the institution’s activities as constitutional architect, at its leadership-role as crisis manager and at its institutional position in the centre of the multi-pillar architecture