386 / 450
386
E
UR
A
MERICA
(B) Empirical Evaluation
When the Treaty of Lisbon came into force, Herman van
Rompuy stood as the first full-time President of the European
Council. His terms coincided with the outbreak, the containment,
and management of the Euro-debt crisis. It is not possible to assess
the implementation of the innovative institutional design of the
Treaty of Lisbon without taking into account van Rompuy’s
performance in handling the Euro-debt crisis. Praises outweigh
criticisms in assessments of van Rompuy’s performance in defining
and carrying out the role the European Council President. The
view is widely-held that had the EU not created this position in
time, and had the person filling the job not been van Rompuy, the
Euro-debt crisis would have been much more serious. Many factors
contributed to van Rompuy’s success as the European Council
President. Apart from his multilingual skills and expertise in
economics, the experience of having served as prime minister in a
society as fractured as Belgium’s gave heads of state and
government confidence
that he would serve well in the job
(Barber, 2010: 55; Chopin & Lefebvre, 2010; Dinan, 2013: 1266;
Howorth, 2011: 10-16).
Given the composition of the European Council and the way
the institution operates, it is hardly surprising that whoever serves
as the European Council President would have the tendency to
“serve the soup to larger Member States” (“The intergovernmental
drift,” 2014). An advisor of van Rompuy, Richard Corbett,
described the job of cajoling 28 heads of state and government into
consensus as equivalent to “herding cats” (European Policy Centre,
2011). That the stronger, bigger, and more willful cats could
sometimes end up leading the herder should not come as a surprise,
since while “nominally equal, some members of the European
Council are more equal than others” (Dinan, 2013: 1260). This
explains why, after seeing how van Rompuy performed as the
European Council President, Jean-Claude Juncker, who competed
for the position with van Rompuy in 2009, breathed a sigh of relief