- “The lesson that governments seem to have learned is that the biggest – and increasingly even the not so big – questions should be decided at the top.”
On 19 March 2026, the EU’s national heads of state or government met for the third time this year as the European Council. Originally scheduled to discuss economic competitiveness, the summit was overtaken by the hostilities in the Middle East and their implications for European security and energy supply. Internally, the European Council was – again – paralysed by the threat of Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán (Fidesz/Patriots) to veto the €90bn EU financial support package for Ukraine that national leaders had actually agreed on in December last year.
Given its internal susceptibility to blockage and apparent incapacity to focus on the EU’s long-term priorities, the question appears whether the European Council still fulfils the functions that proponents attribute to it and that formed the basis of its creation in the 1970s. Indeed, while the European Parliament criticises the European Council for exceeding its Treaty-based mandate, scholars warn that the institution regularly falls short of meeting its self-declared objectives and timelines.
How would the EU look and operate without the European Council? Even though this question might seem practically irrelevant, it is worth investigating how the European Council’s development and current performance affects EU policymaking and polity development.
How the European Council has become the EU’s political centre
The starting point for examining the European Council’s trajectory and current role is legal and constitutional. In the treaties, it is supposed to provide the Union with “the necessary impetus for its development and define its general political directions and priorities” (Art. 15 TEU). It is explicitly not meant to exercise legislative functions.
That division of labour matters. The European Commission is supposed to promote the general interest of the Union and initiate legislation. The Council of the EU and the European Parliament are supposed to legislate and decide the budget. The Court of Justice is supposed to ensure that the law is observed. The European Council was therefore never designed to act like a standing executive steering committee above the rest of the system. Yet that is increasingly how it operates in practice. The gap between formal role and practical influence is the core problem.
Agenda control
Why has the European Council become so dominant? The first reason is agenda control. Every institutional cycle now begins with national leaders agreeing on a strategic agenda that guides the work of the Union for five years. This gives the European Council a powerful first-mover advantage. It tells the Commission what the big priorities are supposed to be, signals to ministers what compromises are politically possible, and frames public expectations about where the Union is going. In theory, that is only broad orientation.
In practice, it often becomes the outer boundary of what the EU institutions are expected to do. This matters because agenda-setting is power. An institution does not need to legislate directly if it can define the menu from which others must choose.
Control over appointments
The second reason is control over appointments. The European Council proposes the candidate for Commission President and is central to the package deals over the Union’s top jobs. That allows national leaders to shape not only policy priorities but also the political leadership that will implement them.
The consequence is that the Commission enters office already marked by a bargain struck among heads of state or government. Even when Parliament retains the formal power to elect the Commission President and approve the College, the real political starting point has often already been fixed at summit level. This weakens the link between Union-wide electoral contestation and executive leadership. It also reinforces the idea that the European Council stands above the ordinary institutional balance rather than within it.
Crisis management
The third reason for the European Council’s dominance is crisis management. During the euro crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and Russia’s war against Ukraine, it became the arena in which the crucial political bargains were struck. This happened for understandable reasons. When governments face existential distributional conflict, leaders want to negotiate personally. They can trade across issues, absorb domestic costs and present outcomes as national victories.
But repeated crisis management has transformed a temporary emergency role into a permanent model of governance. The lesson that governments seem to have learned is that the biggest – and increasingly even the not so big – questions should be decided at the top. That lesson is politically convenient, but constitutionally corrosive. It shifts the centre of gravity away from lawmaking by the ordinary institutions and toward summit bargaining among executives.
Authority
The fourth reason is the practical authority of European Council conclusions. These conclusions are not ordinary legislation, but they often function as if they were. Once national leaders have endorsed a line, it becomes difficult for ministers, the Commission or Parliament to depart from it without appearing to challenge the collective will of the heads of state or government.
This is how the European Council exercises influence beyond its formal competences. It rarely says, “we legislate.” Instead, it sets out the political package, leaves the legal drafting to others, and then constrains their room for manoeuvre. The other institutions remain formally important, but their autonomy is narrowed before the ordinary process even begins. Therefore, the European Council is no longer just a body that gives broad strategic guidance. It has become the Union’s political command post.
Why this changes EU decisions and weakens the other institutions
This dominance has real consequences for the kind of decisions the EU makes. The first consequence is that decisions become more intergovernmental in substance. Because the European Council is composed of national leaders, its compromises reflect what governments can jointly sell at home.
That tends to privilege short-term political manageability over long-term institutional coherence. It also favours solutions that can be framed as state bargains rather than as genuinely supranational choices, in other words: policies with “European added value”. The Union does not stop integrating, but it integrates in a more selective way: more when security concerns, crises or geopolitical necessities force leaders to act, and less when stable, rule-based policy development would require supranational initiative. The European Council does not stop integration, but it filters it through the logic of national executives.
Reactiveness and lack of stamina
The second consequence is that EU decisions become more reactive and less programmatic. The European Council is strongest when a crisis has already arrived, and leaders must break a deadlock. It is much weaker at sustained implementation over time. This helps explain why it often produces bold declarations, ambitious targets and headline bargains, yet struggles when the task is to deliver detailed, durable and internally coherent policy.
The Lisbon Strategy is the classic example for this. In 2000, leaders declared that the EU should become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010, and later backed a target of spending 3 per cent of GDP on research and development. The rhetoric was grand, but delivery never matched it. More than two decades later, EU R&D intensity still remains below that target.
The same pattern appears in the European banking union. During the euro crisis, leaders were central to the political decision to build new crisis-management tools and to launch a banking union. The June 2012 summit language about breaking the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns became one of the defining formulas of that period. Yet the project remains incomplete. A European Deposit Insurance Scheme was proposed years ago but has still not been adopted.
That is not a trivial technical delay. It is evidence of a structural weakness. The European Council can push through the opening move of a major integration project when pressure is maximal, but it often cannot finish what it starts once the crisis atmosphere recedes and the distributive details become politically uncomfortable.
Delay and blackmail
A third consequence of European Council-driven EU policymaking is delay. Because it works by consensus, every high-salience file carries the risk that one government will hold up the whole Union. This creates a politics of leverage and sometimes outright blackmail. Leaders know that a summit is where pressure peaks and visibility is highest, so veto threats become especially valuable.
The 2023-2024 fight over the revision of the EU budget and the Ukraine Facility illustrated the point. One government could block an urgently needed collective decision that the others broadly supported, forcing the issue into another summit. Agreement eventually came, but only after delay, extra drama and renewed side-payments. This is not an isolated malfunction. It is a predictable feature of a system that concentrates too much political authority in an unanimity-based body at the top.
Weakening the other EU institutions
The effect on the other institutions is serious. The Commission loses agenda autonomy. Formally, it still holds the right of initiative in the normal case and remains indispensable for turning political bargains into legal acts and implementation plans. In practice, however, it increasingly works inside a framework set by the European Council. “Invitations” from leaders become quasi-mandates. Political entrepreneurs in the Berlaymont can still shape details, sequencing and packaging, but the space for independent initiative narrows when the central lines have already been drawn above them. A Commission that constantly waits for summit direction is not acting as the guardian and motor of the Union. It becomes more of a technocratic executive for bargains struck elsewhere.
The European Parliament also loses, even though its formal treaty powers remain extensive. In the ordinary legislative procedure, Parliament is a co-legislator on an equal footing with the Council. But if the decisive political trade-offs have already been settled by leaders, Parliament is often left negotiating inside a package it did not shape. This matters not only for institutional pride but for democracy. Parliament is the only directly elected Union-wide chamber. When the European Council dominates the politically salient stages of decision-making, the most visible choices are shifted away from the institution that most clearly represents EU citizens as citizens.
The Council of the EU is affected in a different way. In theory, it remains one of the Union’s two central legislative bodies. In practice, it is often asked to operationalise summit bargains already struck by national leaders. That reduces its space for autonomous compromise-building and makes it look less like an independent co-legislator and more like the delivery belt of the European Council. This is especially problematic because the Council, unlike the European Council, can often decide by qualified majority. Once politics is shifted upward to leaders, a forum that could have taken decisions under majority voting is replaced by one that needs unanimity. That is not an efficiency gain. It is a political choice in favour of higher-level veto power.
Together, these developments have made EU policymaking more centralised, more intergovernmental, more crisis-driven and less balanced institutionally.
Why the European Council has drifted beyond its original purpose
All of this represents a clear deviation from the original purpose of the European Council. The body was created in 1974 because the Community needed a forum for overall direction at a time of upcoming enlargement and economic turbulence. It was meant to supply top-level coordination where the existing machinery seemed too fragmented or too technical.
That original rationale still has some force. The EU arguably does need a place where leaders can settle exceptionally difficult conflicts. But the crucial word is “exceptionally.” The European Council was not created to dominate the routine politics of the Union but to provide broad steering and overall consistency. The more it moves from strategic orientation into detailed intervention, the more it departs from the reason it was established.
Mismatch between political centrality and governing capacity
That mission drift is aggravated by institutional design. The European Council has visibility, authority and media attention, but it does not have the administrative machinery of a real executive. It relies on a comparatively small secretariat and on the Commission, the Council system and national administrations to do the substantive follow-up.
This creates a mismatch between political centrality and governing capacity. Leaders can make announcements, broker packages and impose deadlines, but they cannot themselves supervise the dense everyday work of lawmaking, enforcement and implementation across the Union’s policy system. That is one reason why summit government so often produces a combination of over-centralisation and under-delivery.
A fire brigade that has taken over the city hall
It is also why the European Council’s defenders often confuse two different claims. One claim is that the body is useful in moments of acute crisis. That is true. Another claim is that because it is useful in crises, it should sit at the centre of EU governance more generally. That is much harder to defend.
Crisis leadership and day-to-day institutional balance are not the same thing. A fire brigade is indispensable when a building is burning, but that does not mean it should replace the city’s normal administrative system. The European Council is strongest as the Union’s political fire brigade. The problem is that it increasingly behaves as if permanent firefighting were the normal model of government. The development has also created an illusion of control. Heads of state or government often pre-structure the choices of the other institutions, but they do not have the administrative capacity, legal instruments or democratic design to govern the Union from the centre.
What a Union without the European Council would look like
A European Union without the European Council would therefore look different, but not unrecognisable.
The biggest relative winner in everyday policymaking would be the Commission. Without a standing summit centre that regularly pre-empts initiative, the Commission would have more room to act as a genuine agenda-setter and broker. It could build coalitions with Parliament, test options with national ministers, and structure legislative bargains through the ordinary process rather than through prior leader-level settlements. That would not make the Commission omnipotent. It would still depend on legislative agreement and on member state support for implementation. But it would recover some of the strategic initiative that summit politics has eroded.
The European Parliament would also gain. Without the European Council, the main visible conflict in EU lawmaking would more clearly pit a directly elected chamber against the government ministers gathered in the Council of the EU. That would likely increase the political salience of parliamentary debate, committee work and party competition at EU level. It could also strengthen the electoral logic behind the choice of Commission President, because the office would be less obviously embedded in a leader-level package deal. Put differently, a Union without the European Council would not automatically become fully parliamentary, but it would become more parliamentarisable.
Other institutions could cover the European Council’s tasks
The Council would (again) become the central intergovernmental arena. This is the key institutional shift. Much of the bargaining that currently takes place among prime ministers, chancellors and presidents would move down to ministers, ambassadors and the rotating presidency. In routine files, that could actually improve decision-making, because many issues could then be settled, ultimately, by qualified majority. The price would be that ministers are less able than leaders to make grand bargains across unrelated issues or absorb very large political risks. A Union without the European Council would thus probably be more balanced and more workable in ordinary lawmaking. At most, leaders might have to be called in to produce dramatic all-in-one packages at moments of very high conflict.
The Court of Justice would become more important indirectly. Some disputes currently contained politically at summit level would instead surface as legal and institutional conflicts among the Commission, Parliament and Council. That would make the Court a more visible arbiter of competences and procedure. Yet this would not be a full substitute for political leadership. Courts can enforce law and clarify institutional boundaries, but they cannot create geopolitical strategy or distribute political pain across member states. An EU without the European Council would therefore be more rule-bound; where political questions cannot easily be juridified, national leaders would come in.
Without the European Council, policymaking would be better
Would such a Union be better? On balance, probably yes, at least in ordinary policymaking. It would likely be less dominated by national executives, less dependent on unanimity at the top, and more faithful to the treaty logic that separates strategic guidance from legislation. The Commission would recover initiative, Parliament would gain visibility, and the Council would matter more as the actual legislative partner it is supposed to be.
That would not solve all EU problems. It would not eliminate conflict, disagreement or slow decision-making. But it would make those conflicts play out in institutions that are better designed to handle lawmaking and scrutiny than a summit body of 27 national leaders.
Limiting the European Council to its treaty role
The main counterargument is serious. Without the European Council, the EU would be weaker at high politics: treaty change, major fiscal bargains, foreign-policy crises, enlargement decisions, war-related solidarity and questions that cut across many sectors at once. That is true. But it does not rescue the current model. It merely shows that the European Council has a specific comparative advantage. The right conclusion is not that the EU should let it dominate everything. The right conclusion is that it should be used sparingly and kept closer to its treaty role. The problem today is not that the European Council exists. The problem is that it increasingly acts as though the Union cannot govern without constant intervention from its top table.
Another point is crucial, too. Even if the European Council disappeared formally, leader politics would not vanish. National leaders would still meet, just as they did before the European Council was created. Leaders would likely recreate informal summits whenever the stakes were high enough.
That means the realistic lesson of this counterfactual thinking is not abolition for its own sake. It is that formalising summit dominance inside the EU’s institutional core has costs. Once leaders are permanently installed at the top of the system, every difficult issue is tempted upward. A forum that should be exceptional becomes habitual. A body that should define general priorities starts shaping operational outcomes. And institutions that are supposed to legislate and scrutinise are pushed into second-order roles.
Conclusion
The EU would not collapse if there were no European Council. It would still have a Commission that can propose legislation, a Council and a European Parliament that can adopt it, and a Court of Justice that can police the rules. In fact, in many areas the Union would become more recognisably parliamentary, more legalistic and more faithful to the Community method. The real question is therefore not whether the EU could function without the European Council, but what kind of Union would emerge if summit politics stopped dominating the centre of EU policymaking.
The EU needs less summit government, not more. The European Council should remain a body for broad political direction, constitutional moments and genuine emergencies. It should not continue to function as the de facto command centre of the Union. That role distorts the institutional balance, encourages delay and veto politics, weakens parliamentary democracy, narrows the Commission’s autonomy, and creates a gap between grand political deals and actual delivery.
A Union without the European Council would be less spectacular and sometimes less decisive in moments of acute crisis. But in its everyday lawmaking it would likely be healthier, more balanced and more faithful to the logic of shared European government. The real policy lesson is therefore straightforward: The EU does not need to abolish the European Council tomorrow, but it does need to de-centre it. The more the Union depends on summit politics, the more it undermines the institutions that were actually built to govern Europe.
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Lucas Schramm is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. |
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