Consensus As Implicit Dissent in the EU Council of Ministers (1986-2010)

The EU Council of Ministers decides to adopt Commission proposals either by unanimity or by qualified majority voting (QMV). Yet, according to conventional wisdom, the Council does not vote, it decides ‘by consensus’. We aim to explain why the Council does not vote, what ‘consensus’ means and to determine whether this phenomenon was constant over the period 1986-2010. We contend that the absence of vote is not synonymous with general agreement and that the Council operates like international organizations in which members avoid voting because voting would force the participants to take openly position. We test our hypothesis on the basis of 55 interviews with Council members and archival research. The first result is that the Council presidency attempts to reach qualified majority and not general agreement because it wants to get as many laws as possible adopted. This behavior is constant over the studied period. Then we compare voting practices in public and private settings and present new data on votes before their publication became compulsory (1993). Interviews reveal that the identity of the opponents was rarely reported in the minutes, mostly because national representatives did not want to appear as outvoted. Interviews with officials for the period 1993-2010 show an unexpected continuity of this practice, the actors managing to sidestep the transparency rules. We conclude that in spite of enlargements, consensual decision making has persisted over the years because it is rooted in a complex entwinement of social norms and strategic behaviors. The minority tends to conceal their disagreement by obeying a logic of appropriateness as well as a logic of consequence. This conclusion raises the issue of the Council’s accountability and, at a more general level, of the tradeoff between diplomacy and democracy in international organizations.