The average European voter, as the authors of this book admit, would find it difficult to distinguish the European Council from the Council of the European Union or even the (quite unrelated) Council of Europe. Their aim is to explain the story of its gradual development, in which all ten of them have been first-hand witnesses or participants at some stage. Their work has received the blessing of the former President of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy, who writes in his foreword that their narrative approach to the subject “grasps the essence of the European Council better than would any academic analysis” of the formal references to it in several EU Treaties. By the same token, librarians will perceive that as a narrative, it is not strictly a reference book.
The work takes the form not of a comprehensive history of the Council – still less of the EU as a whole – but of 17 chapters describing and explaining the significance of each of the most important meetings of the Council between 1974 and 2012. It has neither footnotes nor a bibliography, but it has been based on official documents, the biographies of participants and (not least) the personal memories of the authors themselves.
The main narrative is supported by a chronology of all the summit meetings (formal or informal) and official European Council meetings held between 1957 and 2015, a glossary of important EU technical terms (but only 12 of them) and an adequate index. It is also enlivened with photographs, mostly in colour, of some of the more significant meetings and of their better-known participants.
The authors demonstrate how the European Council has evolved from a series of unofficial “fireside chats” in the 1960s to the present situation, in which it is “the apex of Europe’s institutional machinery” and functions as the ultimate political leadership of the Union, though it was not even mentioned in a treaty until 1985 nor recognised as a formal institution of the Union until 2009. In the early days of the six-member European Communities, meetings of heads of state and government had been frowned upon because they were considered to be subject to the risk that national interests, especially those of the larger members, might predominate. But by 1974, the need for firm political leadership in times of crisis had overcome this fear.
The rise of the European Council has not, as the authors show, been a logically planned process but a response to a series of difficulties which have arisen during the evolution of the Union as a whole. The leaders of Europe are no more infallible than anyone else. Often they have been swayed by individual domestic political considerations and occasionally, when consensus proved unattainable, they have put off making a decision at all. Sometimes they have been lucky, as at the Copenhagen meeting in 2002, when they agreed with considerable effort on terms for the admission of the ten new East European members just before Europe was to become deeply divided over the war in Iraq3. Sometimes they have not been, as at the Lisbon meeting of 2000, when grandiloquent plans were announced to “transform the European economy within ten years”; so it would be, but not in the way they had wished. The recent Eurozone crisis, it is suggested, stems largely from the decisions of the Council in the 1990s to set up a monetary union without a corresponding banking union. The consequences of that error are still troubling Europe to this day. Although the book takes account of these, it has been written at a time when it was possible to make only passing references to the overwhelming refugee crisis which struck the EU in 2015 or to the possibility that Britain might opt to leave the Union. So evidently, there will soon be further serious and urgent matters for future Councils to resolve (if they can) and the pieces on the European chessboard will have moved again; meanwhile, this book provides a useful guide to how they reached their present position.
