Council of the European Union

This chapter examines the formal and informal characteristics of the Council of the European Union and how Council decision-making has adapted, evolved, and institutionalized a distinct “way we do things” in the European experience of regional integration. “Brussels” as an institutional environment of EU decision-making includes “inherited traditions” and a “habitus” of cooperation that has become internalized into the firmament of what membership in the EU club itself entails. As core state powers become more and more enmeshed in Brussels, as national sovereignty becomes qualitatively more “pooled,” the Council reinforces itself as a critical institutional interface in managing the collective decision-making that this system of continuous negotiation entails. Qualitatively, the Council's institutional environment is something worth studying as a social field precisely for this reason. As this chapter shows, recognizing the internal variations and nuances of Council decision-making practices across the many networked venues and sites of negotiation is gaining better traction in EU studies, and the non-material or ideational elements in the Council's “rules of the game” are increasingly acknowledged as part of the culture of EU decision-making.