European leadership in transition: Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy

Abstract

European integration, under the impetus of Monnet and Schuman, was born as an elite project and remained so for the next half century. The Franco-German Treaty of 1963, although having little direct institutional effect, further ensconced the expectation that leaders would direct Europe. The emergence of regularised summits in the 1970s, allowed leaders to set European agendas, free of the constraints of direct democratic accountability. Because EU leadership functions have been hidden within the opaque structures of EU governance, this has inevitably bred popular impressions of a ‘democratic deficit’. Yet popular misgivings about European governance have surfaced only on rare occasions, particularly when voters have been asked to ratify treaty changes. The referendums of 1992 (TEU), of 2005 (the proposed constitutional treaty, with French and Dutch rejections) and of 2008 (the Lisbon Treaty, with Irish rejection) testify to the gap between elite commitment to integration and their more sceptical publics. Hence, such exceptional votes aside, analyses of European integration politics have quite understandably focused heavily on top leaders and their interactions.