How Agents Weaken their Principals’ Incentives to Control: The Case of EU Negotiators and EU Member States in Multilateral Negotiations

Abstract

This article examines why and how agents weaken the incentives to control of their principals when the EU negotiates international agreements. Based on analyses of various EU decision‐making processes on international trade and environmental agreements, this article argues that the EU negotiator‐as‐agent has a number of tools to affect the cost–benefit analysis on the basis of which the member states‐as‐principals decide on the activation of their control mechanisms. In order to avoid that the member states reject the international agreement reached by the EU negotiator (the Commission and/or the Presidency), the latter needs to reduce the range of behavioural options of the former. Three strategic paths are available to the agent to weaken its principals’ control incentives: (a) calibrating the member states’ involvement in the international negotiations, (b) being the first mover in determining its own instructions, and (c) exploiting the inconclusiveness among the member states.

Key Words:

• European Commission
• international environmental negotiations
• international trade negotiations
• presidency
• principal–agent

Notes

1. Statement by the French minister of agriculture in the context of the meeting of the Council of Ministers of the EU of November 7, 1990, that focused on the Uruguay Round negotiations, as quoted in Le Monde, 8 November 1990, p. 29, and referred to in Kerremans (1993, 242).

2. Analysing the EU negotiator’s agenda‐setting power confronts us with the ‘methodological pitfall of observational equivalence’ (Damro 2007). This means that if we observe signals of ‘independent’ or ‘autonomous’ agenda‐setting behaviour by the agent, this behaviour may be not independent or autonomous, but only indicating that the agent rationally anticipates the reactions and the control mechanisms of the principals (Pollack 2003). To overcome this methodological difficulty, we followed Pollack’s and Damro’s suggestion to measure the agent’s behaviour carefully by process tracing, by conducting systematic interviews with participants (both agents and principals) in the EU decision‐making process.

3. Data collection took place over a long time span as we basically bring together the results obtained through different projects on the EU’s external negotiating behaviour during the last 15 years. This article presents a common pattern in these results.