Does the Trio matter? The case of the Slovenian EU Council presidency.

• Author: Udovic, Bostjan
• Position: POLSCI PAPERS - Case study

Introduction

The idea of establishing a Trio Presidency for the European Union Council (hereafter EU Council) aimed at replacing the national short-term oriented presidencies with a more stable and long-term oriented presidency, to assist the less experienced (new) member states in conducting their presidencies, and finally to promote Community interests. Within this context, the key questions are whether the Trio structure: (i) materializes Community interests better than in the case of a single country presidency; (ii) makes presidencies less short-term oriented; and (iii) enables better continuity of programs at EU level.

Taking into consideration the above-mentioned characteristics of the Trio, our analysis, has four goals:

(i) to evaluate the Trio's modus operandi characteristics;

(ii) to clarify whether the Trio has been (and still is) instrumental in helping newcomers to conduct their presidencies;

(iii) to determine to what extent experiences of the 'old' and large nations influence the decision-making processes of the new and small states;

(iv) to provide some suggestions for improving the Trio form of presidency in the future based on the Slovenian presidency (in the first half of 2008), as perceived by its internal actors (i. e. decision-makers, politicians, diplomats and other civil servants).

We concentrate on five research questions:

1. Does the Trio form of presidency represent a substantial assistance mechanism for small new member states lacking human capital, knowledge and experiences? How far does a small state--by shouldering on EU institutions--compensate its limited pool of human resources and knowledge gaps?

2. Does the role of the Trio differ at different stages of the presidency (presidency preparation, execution, evaluation)?

3. Which were the most problematic issues for Slovenia within German-Portuguese-Slovene Trio? Was Slovenia able to cope with the challenges and opportunities offered by the Trio structure? Was Slovenia able to materialise a more efficient and a better-coordinated public administration? Which were the key internal problems harming Slovenia's presidency?

4. Was Slovenia, within the Trio, an "agenda-setter", "policy entrepreneur" or just an "honest broker"? Was Slovenia just following the Trio programme (downloading) or did public officials use this opportunity in order to influence the EU agenda (uploading)?

5. Do asymmetries in the Trio structure (different size of states, their membership age and experiences with presiding) substantially influence the conduct of the presidency and presidency policy-making?

The article is organized as follows. The introduction precedes the theoretical part which provides a conceptual framework about the Trio presidency. In the third part, the methodology of the survey, i. e. semi-structured interviewing and focus-group, is presented. This constitutes a framework for discussing the final results presented in the fourth part of the article. Finally, the article provides a conclusion and gives some suggestions for further research.

EU Council presidency, Trio and Trio member states: a theoretical overview

The team presidency concept was drafted at the Seville summit in 2002. The draft was elaborated at the meeting of Permanent Representatives (COREPER II) to the EU in March 2006, and approved by the General Affairs and External Relations Council (GAERC) in June 2006. It replaced the previous one-year operational programme and three-year strategic programme for the Union by an 18-month programme of three successive Presidencies. The idea was to overcome discontinuities between consecutive presidencies and the insufficiency of the six months presidencies to pursue more complex projects (SlosarCik, 2008: 92).

The background of the process of establishing a Trio presidency was the idea that different cultural and economic traditions are rooted in the EU member states. This implied that in order to overcome possible tensions between various categories of members ('old' vs. 'new', 'big' vs. 'small', 'Eastern' vs. 'Western'), a common denominator should be found (Agh, 2008: 23). Secondly, the Trio establishment was supported by the reasoning that such framework would 'force' presiding member states to prioritise the common (communitarian) interests (see Lovec and Erjavec, 2012a, 2012b) over their own, national interests. However, the idea of establishing Trio presidencies consisted of more than just "mitigating" among different national interests (Bunse, Rittelmeyer and Van Hecke, 2011) and as a polygon for balancing individual presidencies (and its actors). It was based on the presumption that tensions among member states can be overcome by aligning countries coming from different social and political backgrounds. One criterion for achieving this was to align countries on the basis of their "size", while the next criterion, which strongly influenced the Trio structure, was the length of EU membership of a certain member. Next to these two "official criteria" one additional, "unofficial" was taken into consideration, i. e. the geographical (and consequently also the cultural) dispersion of countries within a single Trio (3). This last criterion is quite an important one because it denies the possibility to create a regional (or culturally similar) block, hindering the processes within the EU (cf. also Mazzucelli and Dragomaca, 2009).

Changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty (2009) (4), have shifted some powers within the key EU institutions. Changes such as (i) the establishment of two new functions (i. e. the President of the European Council and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy; hereafter High Representative) (cf. Cazenave, 2008; Newman, 2009; Barber, 2010; Kajnc, Guggenbuhl and Lavadoux, 2011); (ii) the split of GAERC into General Affairs Council (GAC) and Foreign Affairs Council (FAC); (iii) the empowerment of the European Parliament and the Commission have created some imbalances within the institutional triangle by giving more power to the most operational/competent stake-holder (cf. Bojinovic Fenko, 2012). From the symbolic point of view, the biggest shift occurred with the formation of FAC, now chaired by the High Representative, which is at the same time a member (by function) of the EU Council and the European Commission. Nevertheless, before all these changes have occurred, enough room for manoeuvring (and performing its own activities) has been left for presidency holders, which have been frequently exploited (cf. Tallberg, 2003: 6-8; Broman, 2005: 20). These changes affected and, to a great extent, re-structured the role of the rotating Presidency. Therefore, we can no longer talk of a "traditional rotating Presidency". The rotating Presidency's role remains; its influence, however, is shifted more towards the EU's internal level in terms of its important role of consensus-builder (see more also in Bunse, Rittelmeyer and Van Hecke, 2011; Van Hecke and Bursens, 2011).

In comparison to its previous role, it became obvious that it decreased particularly in the Foreign and Security arena. But "it seems that the role of the Presidency depends not only on competences and Treaty provisions, but also on other features such as member states' attitude and flexibility as well as internal and external uncertainty" (Szabo, 2011: 4 and 5). In addition, "the Presidency's 'changing roles' have not yet fully developed in the post-Lisbon system. Lastly, the role of the chair depends also on how the Presidency is understood and what competencies, capacities and expertize the presiding state is able to engage in during its time at the helm. Provided the expertise and competencies, the role of the rotating Presidency can still be influential even in the EU's external relations as this field includes also issues belonging to exclusive and shared competences" (see Szabo, 2011: 31).

Despite the fact that small states are sometimes seen as unimportant because of their size and population (and sometimes economic power), the European Union institutional set up and its sui generis specifics allows them to convert "size disadvantages" into "coalition advantages". This can be achieved through different channels of formal and informal sources of power, linked to structural power (Strange, 1995), sometimes defined also as soft power (Nye, 2004; Raskovic and Morec, 2012). The soft power sources of a small state can be various; political preferences and capabilities to negotiate agreements, economic power, cultural particularities etc. (cf. also Udovic and Svetlicic, 2009; Kuncic, 2011). The political strength of small states is not linked to the military power of a state, but rather to its diplomatic capabilities, prestige and cohesion. All three items can be achieved by a powerful and skilled national administration (cf. Thorhalsson, 2006: 19), which is able to govern the state, take an active part in bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral negotiations, and pursues national interests at maximum, whenever it is possible.

The idea of Trios is based on the notion that all Trio member states are equal and should be treated equally. However, the reality is quite different, since various Trio presidencies have proven that in some cases states are "more equal" than in others. The "equality" is not measured by the hard power of a state, but more by different activities and statements that a state issued during the time of its Presidency. In the case of the first Trio Presidency (Germany Portugal

--Slovenia) the situation was even more interesting. Not only that the Trio was composed of three states of different size, but Slovenia combines two characteristics: being small and a new member state. In this case, smallness was understood as a panacea for the Trio functioning, because--deriving from theoretical presumptions--small states are: (a) flexible and capable to be selective in their priorities; (b) honest...