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, Oriol Costa Fernández (secret.) , Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués (voc.) The EU is seen as a body increasingly ruled by intergovernmentalism. Member states are portrayed as the winners of a power contest with supranational institutions, which have been marginalised in critical decisions of European politics. Following up on the traditional intergovernmental-supranational debate, new intergovernmentalism has captured this trend and inaugurated a renewed interest on the nature of European integration in the literature.
The central premise of this theory is that, since the Maastricht Treaty, member states have taken the reins of European integration and sidelined supranational institutions in setting the pace and direction of current policy developments. It also assumes that the institutions where member states are represented are at the centre of these dynamics, with the European Council acting as the catalyst of integration and the Council becoming the central decision-making institution. When delegation of power occurs, new intergovernmentalism understands that member states make use of de novo bodies such as the EEAS to provide support to their initiatives, but not to exercise leadership.
Most scholarly contributions to new intergovernmentalism have analysed the dynamics of the Economic and Monetary Union and the EU security and defence policies. However, there is an analytical gap in the literature, which this thesis aims to address, in applying new intergovernmentalism to hybrid areas of activity such as external action. In here, the Lisbon Treaty has brought together the supranational external relations of the European Commission and the intergovernmental CFSP/CSDP, in the hands of member states, for the purpose of policy coherence. The Treaty has also put forward remarkable institutional innovations such as the EEAS and created the position of the HR/VP, giving it a formal right of initiative.
This research aims to contrast the main assumptions of new intergovernmentalism against the policy-making dynamics generated by the Lisbon Treaty. To do so, it uses the policy-making processes of EU strategies as a way to illustrate the inter-institutional relations in CFSP and external action. The case studies of this research are the European Security Strategy (2003), adopted under the former pillar system and in the realm of the CFSP, and the EU Global Strategy (2016), the first post-Lisbon strategy covering the whole of external action. The study of the policy-making processes of strategies -an empirical gap in the literature in itself- is performed by breaking down strategy-making into four different phases: agenda-setting, policy formulation, policy output and implementation.
The results of this research show an increased role of Brussels-based institutions in strategy-making. This trend can be traced back to the ESS, which inaugurated a novel policy-making mode based on institutionalised intergovernmentalism, whereby HR Solana and the Council Secretariat centralised the strategy-making process. This came as a consequence of Solana's strong activism and the partial delegation of initiative by member states, setting up a highly institutionalised policy formulation process in a prominently intergovernmental policy area, the CFSP.
This novel policy-making mode is further reinforced in the EUGS, where the HR/VP has become the policy entrepreneur of a new strategy-making process. Making full use of her right of initiative, Mogherini has shaped the process and the contents of the new strategy, in the benefit of a "whole of EU" approach to external action. The centrality of the HR/VP and the EEAS has resulted in a process of autonomy in intergovernmentalism, where the EUGS has become the vehicle for subsequent implementation initiatives.
In sum, this research nuances central aspects of new intergovernmentalism regarding the predominance of member states in current integration dynamics, arguing that the shift from CFSP to external action has fundamentally strengthened the capacity of de novo bodies to lead and shape policy initiatives.
