What Makes Collaborative Leadership Successful? The Cognitive Dimension of European Integration

Rather than having a single leader at the helm, the European Union (EU) has several interdependent leaders at the supranational and intergovernmental level who share the power to govern the EU together. Collaborative leadership thus stands at the heart of the European polity and politics. In particular, smooth collaboration between the French and German political leaders and the Commission President has often been cited as necessary for successful policy making. Yet, scholars of European integration have only scarcely examined the challenges, processes and outcomes of EU collaborative leadership. To help fill this lacuna in European studies, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to draw lessons about the nature, conditions and consequences of EU leader-leader interactions from theories of collaborative leadership, bringing together the nexus between leadership, collaboration and policy-making. Second, it aims to study what makes collaborative leadership successful in European politics. One of the central conditions for successful collaboration identified are shared beliefs and values among the leaders involved. This paper will examine the similarity and difference of the belief systems of four EU leadership triplets that played a vital role in the development and implementation of European economic and monetary union: (1) François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and Jacques Delors; (2) Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and Romano Prodi; (3) Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and José Barroso; and finally, (4) François Hollande, Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker. By using Comparative Cognitive Mapping, the paper reveals the level of cognitive convergence in leaders’ economic paradigm and vision on the finalité of European integration and explores how this has shaped the process of economic and monetary integration during their incumbencies. The study thus permits us to ascertain the extent and level of convergence in beliefs involved in making collaborative European politics run successfully.