On Monday March 31, the BMW Center for German and European Studies hosted Dr. Mareike Kleine from the London School of Economics European Institute for her talk, “Taming of the Shrews?: The (Non-) Enforcement of Informal Norms in the European Council.” Dr. Kleine, currently on sabbatical at Princeton University, discussed her research on how informal norms in the European Council empower the body to function and what happens when rogue leaders challenge these established boundaries.
After a brief introduction by the Center’s Director Professor Abraham Newman, Dr. Kleine began her lecture by explaining the functioning and purpose of the European Council, where heads of state and government set priorities and address crises. She emphasized that decisions in the European Council are typically made by consensus. “There is hardly majority voting,” she noted, highlighting the Council’s reliance on informal norms to maintain cohesion.
One such norm, which she termed diffuse reciprocity, establishes an expectation that leaders engage constructively in negotiations, trusting that goodwill will be returned in the future. “Leaders avoid excessive demands or obstructionism,” she explained.
“This norm is inherently ambiguous. It is hard to say when goodwill ends and obstructionism starts” Kleine said, referencing recent difficulties with European leaders. Specifically, she outlined two case studies: former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s negotiation efforts with the council in 2015 which led to Brexit and Viktor Orbán’s repeated norm violations, especially related to European solidarity with Ukraine in recent years. She began with Cameron’s case.
“One of [his] demands was an emergency break that Britain could apply whenever it wanted to curb migration to the United Kingdom” she stated. “Those demands in 2015 came right at the height of the European migration crisis and in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis.” Kleine explained that UK leaders feared appeasing British demands would lead to a “domino effect” that could unravel the European project.
Kleine explained that European leaders like former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte worried that if they gave in, Cameron would double down and ask further demands, so they publicly denounced these demands as unacceptable. Kleine further outlined that the European media environment gave heavy coverage and scrutiny toward Cameron’s perceived norm violations.
Later in the lecture, Kleine turned to Orban’s frequent norm violations in which he uses his veto power to prevent European aid for Ukraine (a position that is deeply unpopular with the European public). She outlined that while the European Council has attempted to curb Orban’s intransigence, the response to his norm violations has been ambiguous, with partial EU fund releases undermining the credibility of the council’s repudiation of these violations.
“There has been some goodwill on the part of Hungary but aid is a much more important factor in this” Kleine stated. Ultimately, she questions “Will Orban become Trumps trojan horse in the EU?”
Kleine then sat down with Dr. Newman for questions, which he began by comparing norm violations in the European council to the antagonistic figure of “Haman” from the story retold each year during the Jewish festival of Purim. Haman is a malevolent leader whose cruelty leads to his downfall.
“In this story, there is a bottom up process to the enforcement of norms. We often think of norms [in reference to] the leaders, the elites, but the elites need somebody to force them to act and that is the public,” Newman explained.
One graduate student asked Dr. Kleine about the meeting of Italian Prime Minister Giorga Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz in Paris to coordinate strategy to counter Orban’s intransigence. “What do you think is the role of ideology in providing an exit strategy from obstructionism?” Kleine again stressed the importance of pressure from the public and especially from media news sources that can apply pressure on leaders to behave in accordance with established norms.
