‘Leadership styles in the European Council – How leaders behave behind closed doors’ by Martina Vass

Guest post Carlo Marzocchi

A conceptual framework for analysing leadership as behaviour

Slovak journalist and scholar Martina Vass sets out to investigate the ‘leadership styles’ of some members of the European Council by focusing on their behaviour at three defining moments: the financial crisis, the Ukraine conflict in 2014, and the migration crisis in 2015. With this focus on crises, it provides a good companion to another book written by a journalist, Jan Werts’ The European Council in the era of crises.

Anyone who has anything to do with the European Council will be intuitively aware of how its meetings and the process leading up to them revolve around that elusive thing called ‘leadership’. They will also have observed that members of the European Council exercise leadership in different ways. The main merit of the book is that it explores which factors determine the leadership styles of a sample of (former) members of the European Council (Grybauskaite, Orban, Merkel, Rutte, Faymann).

It does so after having defined leadership, rather loosely, as ‘behaviour with a task- and a relational dimension’, which I would paraphrase as ‘offering solutions to a common problem’ (the task dimension) and ‘engaging with others to gather support for that solution’ (the relational dimension). The choice to not over-define the object of study may well be deliberate; besides, the many quotes from practitioners, taken as a whole, provide a fairly accurate view of what leadership in the European Council is meant to be in practice.

The evidence used in the research is a set of 58 semi-structured interviews held between 2019 and 2021. This corpus is referenced at the end of the book and is an achievement in itself, as the author managed to have on record, albeit partly anonymised, a remarkable array of former members of the European Council, members of government, permanent representatives and senior officials. The interviews are quoted extensively in the book, but they would deserve to be reproduced in full and shared more widely (perhaps in an online appendix?).

The author moves from the theory of ‘constitutive effects of agents and structures’, or, in plain language, the assumption that a complex system such as the European Council will both be shaped by the attitudes and behaviour of its members and will in turn constrain and shape those attitudes and behaviours. In other words, leadership does not simply coincide with the qualities of the person involved. This is a strong methodological feature of the book: leadership can be observed as types (or degrees) of behaviour in context, rather than as a quality that is either present or absent.

To structure her analysis of leadership as a behaviour, the author resorts to a well-known framework that originated in business studies, namely the one articulated by D. Goleman in 2000 in the Harvard Business Review, which in turn is rooted in the notion of emotional intelligence. Goleman identified six leadership styles, described by rather intuitive, and not always clear-cut, labels: visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and coercive.

The model has been criticised on various grounds, but what is important here is that the styles represent different degrees of cooperativeness, or lack thereof, and as such are relevant for a body that works by consensus such as the European Council. The point could also be made that Goleman’s taxonomy reflects a view of leaders that is typical of the hierarchical structures of business, while the European Council is a gathering of peers, at least nominally.

The author also expands on what may lead a member to decide to exercise leadership at all, or not, in a given situation: understandably, the fact that a country has a stake in a particular issue will be an incentive to exercise leadership. However, while this is certainly a relevant explanation, it risks overlooking  the agency of political leaders in making an issue salient for their country – in other words, it would be interesting to explore how issue selection and framing can support the emergence of a particular leadership.

Another useful conceptual tool offered by the book is the analysis of the factors constraining or enabling the choice of a leadership style by a participant, and the exploration of how behaviour in the European Council is shaped by the domestic political context. In particular, leaders will be more likely to choose (or constrained to choose) a more cooperative style if:

• they are structurally (constitutionally) weaker in the political system
• they are not backed by an ideologically coherent coalition
• the domestic public opinion and political elite do not support the solution proposed by the leader

Accordingly, one of the main findings of the book is that when domestic factors are conducive to a cooperative leadership style, that will extend to their behaviour in the European Council, which in turn reinforces the culture of consensus and compromise that is typical of the European Council  – however with some notable exceptions.

A culture of compromise

The latter point is worth expanding with a couple of quotes from the corpus, as they clearly illustrate how high-ranking interviewees capture the norms and expectations that operate, or in their view should operate, in the European Council: namely, a culture of compromise and what the author calls the ‘Europeanisation’ effect, i.e. the search for solutions that, while meeting national interests, generate a wider, European value:

• “You can be tough by staying in your position but not solving anything is usually worse, because the next month it would come back” (De Gooijer, 26/10/2021).
• “You have to come up with an argument that transcends the peculiarities or characteristics of one country and that can be adopted in a more European perspective” (Muscat, 03/11/2021).
• “Even the simplest problem has two or three sides. Sometimes it is possible to solve the problem by making it bigger and bringing in one or two more sides. Because nothing is solved until everything is solved” (De Gooijer, 26/10/2021).
• “A person’s strength in the European Council comes from the fact that he or she is able to come from a national interest to proposing something in the interest of the whole Union” (De Ruyt, 13/06/2020).

The author herself offers a good paraphrase of this:

“As several respondents mention, it is absolutely useless to argue in the European Council that a particular country is so special that it deserves special treatment. Each country is special in its own way and each has its own peculiarities. The challenge is not to convince the others about singularities of an individual country, but to broaden the argument in order to encompass the singularities of others.”

Vass notes, based on ample comments by the respondents, that a major exception in this culture of compromise started to appear with the migration crisis of 2015. Projecting this to our time, it would be interesting to see how the same respondents would assess recent developments in European Council decision-making, for example when the text on Ukraine was repeatedly endorsed by 26 member states only. At the very end the author sketches out the hypothesis that cracks in the compromise culture could prejudice the functioning of the European Council, or, as I would phrase it, its ability to exercise collective leadership on behalf of the whole EU.

Still on the migration crisis, Vass doubts the effectiveness of Merkel’s visionary leadership style in that situation (note that, in Goleman’s taxonomy, ‘visionary’ is not necessary an effective style) and wonders whether a different behaviour would have led to a better outcome.

With all the caveats on counterfactuals, in order to present even a reasoned hypothesis on that, the book would need a much closer analysis of the actual negotiation. Indeed, while the respondents report a wealth of insights, including specific instances of behaviour, these are not set in the context of a detailed reconstruction of negotiating processes.

Admittedly, such a ‘thick description’ would need a whole book series by itself, yet precisely that type of analysis could explain the mechanisms by which different and often colliding individual leadership styles give rise to the collective leadership of the European Council.

This reconstruction of negotiation processes is also where a closer look at textual evidence, in addition to interviews, would have been useful, as the textual outcome of a negotiation is arguably a metric, as approximate as it may be, of the success of a leadership style. To be fair, in her conclusions the author  does point to this and to several other avenues for further research...

Martina Vass PhD is a political scientist, former University of Oxford Weidenfeld scholar, and journalist. She worked in different private and government institutions in Slovakia and has a professional background in EU affairs.

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