How intergovernmental are Intergovernmental Conferences? An example from the Maastricht Treaty reform

Abstract

In the 1991 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), conflicts over social policy endangered the whole treaty reform package. The path-breaking innovations that finally occurred (although initially for eleven members only) regarding both competence and procedures made the Maastricht Treaty a turning point for European social policy. For these reasons, the Maastricht Social Agreement represents an important case for testing the proposition that dynamics beyond power and intergovernmental bargaining can play a decisive role in EU reform. The insight that both a Euro-level process of preference formation and Euro-level actors mattered here indicates that state-of-the-art research must pay attention to such dynamics as potentially relevant factors in all instances of EU treaty reform. EU reform, even at the constitutional level of treaty change and even in formal IGCs, can be much less 'intergovernmental' than the name 'Intergovernmental Conference' suggests.