Documents: Arguing and Bargaining
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Thomas Risse and Mareike Kleine
NEWGOV Policy Brief no. 15, Spring 2008
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Mareike Kleine and Thomas Risse
How can the quality of EU treaty negotiations be improved? In a recent paper we broached this subject (Risse and Kleine 2007) when assessing the legitimacy of treaty revisions at the example of traditional Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) and the Convention method. We argued that the legitimacy of decision-making may vary considerably with the institutional set up in which processes of choice take place. In our comparison we found that the Convention method substantially improved the prospect for deliberation in decision-making, and thus led to both a more legitimate and qualitatively better outcome.
In this paper we revisit this question, but broaden the scope of our analysis to the preparation, negotiation, and ratification stage of the five treaty revisions the EU has undergone within the last 20 years. Section 1 introduces criteria for assessing the “quality” of treaty-revisions. In the light of these criteria, section 2 analyses the three stages of treaty revisions. The last, third section discusses factors that determine the quality of treaty revisions, and, on that basis, makes more specific recommendations for improving the quality of treaty negotiations.
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Mareike Kleine, Thomas Risse
How legitimate are treaty revision procedures in the European Union? Since the 1980s the EC/EU has been in a semi-permanent reform and subject to various revisions of its constitutional structure. Several multilateral negotiations were convened in order to amend the founding treaties or to create new policy areas outside the Communities, respectively. The considerable effect that EU’s policies have on the European citizen’s daily life implies asking for the legitimacy of the method of those minutious adjustments. In this paper we focus on two basic models for treaty revisions, namely Intergovernmental Conferences (IGC) on the one hand, and the combination of an IGC with a Convention as its preparatory body on the other. We therefore ask, whether and how the Convention may add legitimacy to the original intergovernmental procedure.
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Mareike Kleine, Thomas Risse
New modes of governance focus on the inclusion of non-state actors in the provision of common goods, on the one hand, and non-hierarchical modes of steering on the other. In this paper the focus is on the latter dimension of these modes, and on one particular form of non-hierarchical rule-making, namely arguing and persuasion. We ask, which institutional scope conditions are particularly conducive to enabling arguing to prevail in negotiations and, thus, to affect both their process and outcome. After briefly sketching out the state of the art and our research question, we will subsequently set out several preliminary conjectures on arguing and persuasion in governance. Considering European treaty revisions as a “laboratory” for probing those conjectures, we will then discuss how to observe the prevalence of arguing, and how to derive meaningful conclusions from our observation.
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Mareike Kleine, Thomas Risse
Why did the European Convention manage to adopt a single text that produced no left-overs? Against the background of permanent cleavages in the EU and the failure of the Amsterdam and Nice IGCs, the negotiation of the Conventional Treaty with its far-reaching revision of the EU’s primary law is puzzling. First empirical studies that try to solve this puzzle emphasize the importance of the inclusion of new actors and of the issues at stake. They claim that the Convention facilitated deliberation, but when it came to the crucial issues, intergovernmental bargaining prevailed. However, these analyses tend to equate intergovernmentalism with the notion of bargaining and therefore risk overlooking important causal mechanisms for the effectiveness of arguing. We claim that a more structured comparison of the institutional settings might give important insights into the institutional conditions for the actual effectiveness of arguing as a steering mode in governance. Furthermore, it will improve our knowledge about the pros and cons of the Convention method.
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Mareike Kleine
The tasks of the Praesidium were described in the Laeken declaration: "The Praesidium will serve to lend impetus and will provide the Convention with an initial working basis". In retrospect, however, it did much more than that. Centred around the objective of achieving a "broad consensus on a single proposal [that] would carry considerable weight and authority" (Giscard D’Estaing) vis-à-vis the following IGC, the Praesidium played a crucial role in building and reaching a consensus on such a text. It therefore exerted leadership by influencing process and outcome of the negotiations. Drawing on several theories of leadership in multilateral negotiations, this paper explores why and how the Praesidium played such a decisive role. (Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Session of Workshops - Workshop no. 26 on "The Role of Political Agency in the Constitutional Politics of the EU", Granada, 14-19 April 2005)
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Thomas Risse and Mareike Kleine
Arguments are all pervasive in negotiations; and yet, conventional negotiation theories treat them as merely epiphenomenal to power and interests. The past decade, however, witnessed a growing interest in theories of deliberation and their application at the international level. This article takes stock of the state of the art. It argues that the “deliberative turn” has forced both rationalist and constructivist scholars to refine their arguments and reconsider their methodology. We argue that the new research frontier for constructivists is in assessing under which circumstances arguments affect negotiating actors’ preferences, and subsequently lead to outcomes that are not easily explained in pure bargaining terms. The article will be submitted to the Journal of European Public Policy within a special issue to appear in 2009/2010.
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