Explaining informal policy-making patterns in the Eurozone crisis: decentralized bargaining and the theory of EU institutions

During the Eurozone crisis, the so-called ‘Merkozy duumvirate’ emerged as an informal, but highly visible EU policy-making pattern. This article asks why such forms of decentralized bargaining emerge and what this implies for the theory of EU institutions. According to an approach based on negotiation theory, the article argues that Merkozy is a strategic tool used by Germany to realize its preferences on EU crisis management. Based on an incomplete contracts theory of EU institutions, instead, the article analyses Merkozy as an informal institution created by France and Germany to avoid being discriminated by supranational institutions. Both approaches are employed to assess Merkozy’s role in the decision-making process leading to the adoption of the Fiscal Compact

Resuming European Détente and European Integration

International audienceFrance and the INF Treaty In 1987, the two superpowers signed the INF Treaty, thus officially ending the Euromissile crisis. Though neither the French President nor any other French representative sat at the negotiation table, France itself was present-for throughout the Euromissile crisis, French diplomacy had played a decisive role. Pursuing his own Ostpolitik, in which he always took a tough line with Moscow, President François Mitterrand had actively encouraged Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to resume the U. S.-Soviet dialogue on détente and disarmament, which had come to a standstill at the beginning of the 1980s. Mitterrand had held extensive conversations with both Reagan and Gorbachev in 1984/85 and had offered both of them advice on how to get back into meaningful negotiations.1 This was important to Mitterrand's own policy aims. The return to confrontation between the superpowers at the end of the 1970s considerably reduced France's room for maneuver in the field of East-West cooperation. It also hindered progress towards European integration. So, from the French perspective, any improvement in the area of détente and disarmament between the two superpowers and any steps forward towards ending the Euromissile crises would make better conditions for cooperation within Europe-both between the Eas