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about not having gotten the job: “If I had become president of the
European Council, it might have exacerbated the conflict within
the EU. I wouldn’t have been content
merely summarizing the
views of the other heads of state and government
. Although I come
from a small member state, I like to say what I think. I see myself
as a driving force rather than
a follower
” (“Jean-Claude Juncker,”
2011; emphasis added).
In other words, the treaty design not only places the
European Council even more firmly at the center of political
gravity, but further enhances the influence of larger states. As much
as the EP desired to scrutinize the increasingly powerful European
Council (Buzek, 2011: 9), MEPs critical of the European Council’s
handling of the Euro-debt crisis could only complain about van
Rompuy being too deferential to Merkel; they could do nothing
about it (Dinan, 2013: 1262). Former European Parliament
Vice-president Isabelle Durant lamented that the old rotating
presidency system would have better preserved the common
interest of all Member States (
“
The intergovernmental drift,”
2014). In sum, there are times when the function of the new post
becomes nothing more than an instrument through which informal
deals struck between or among (larger) Member States could be
formally placed on the agenda, and thereby be imposed on the rest
of the Member States. However much the president tries to be a
stateless honest broker, when the brokering is based on some
blueprint pre-agreed by the larger states, the gatekeeping function
of the European Council is undermined. The room for the
executives of the “less relevant” states to guard their national
interests has shrunk as a result of the creation of the permanent
European Council President.
V. National Parliaments
At the core of the EU’s democratic deficit is the problem that
national executives have grown too powerful at the expense of