The Council

The Council ¹ is one of the core decision-making institutions of the European Union (EU) and plays a crucial role in the EU’s relations with the outside world. It is the key forum for the representation of national governments in EU policy-making. The Council is involved in nearly all aspects concerning the EU’s role in global governance. As the other contributions to this book provide reviews of the various different aspects of the EU’s role in global governance this chapter concentrates on the main governance mechanisms through which the Council becomes engaged in the external relations of the Union. To this end, three main roles of Council are distinguished. First, the Council enjoys legislative powers with regard to a number of the EU’s external policies. This means decisions adopted by the Council bind other EU institutions and all member states to comply with a set of policies. Its legislating capacities make the Council an exceptionally strong actor in global governance as they effectively ensure that both the relevant EU institutions and the member states behave like a unitary actor towards third countries or other regional and global governance organizations. The second role of the Council played in the EU’s external relations is derived from the fact that the legislative powers of the Union do not extend to all areas of external governance. Yet the Council exercises a policy co-ordination function in those fields of external EU activity in which it cannot impose a unitary and consistent policy stance on all member states through the mechanism of Community legislation. This governance mode also reflects the arrangement that in a number of areas of public policy member states retain their exclusive decision-making powers but have nevertheless agreed for the EU to play a greater role in these fields too. The most prominent example is the evolving field of common foreign and security policy. Third, the Council not only acts as the core forum for internal EU decision-making, but it also plays a representational role in the EU’s relations with the rest of the world. This implies that the Council directly consults and negotiates with governments of third countries and representatives of international organizations. The following section reviews each of these three roles of the Council in turn.