European Council - History

History

Further information: List of European Council meetings

The first summits of EU heads of state or government were held in February and July 1961 (in Paris and Bonn respectively). They were informal summits of the leaders of the European Community and were started due to then-French President Charles de Gaulle's resentment at the domination of supranational institutions (e.g. the European Commission) over the integration process, but petered out. The first influential summit held, after the departure of De Gaulle, was The Hague summit of 1969, which reached an agreement on the admittance of the United Kingdom into the Community and initiated foreign policy cooperation (the European Political Cooperation) taking integration beyond economics.

The summits were only formalized in the period between 1974 and 1988. At the December summit in Paris in 1974, following a proposal from then-French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, it was agreed that more high level, political input was needed following the "empty chair crisis" and economic problems. The inaugural European Council, as it became known, was held in Dublin on 10 and 11 March 1975 during Ireland's first Presidency of the Council of the European Union. In 1987, it was included in the treaties for the first time (the Single European Act) and had a defined role for the first time in the Maastricht Treaty. At first only two meetings per year were required, now there are on average six European Councils each year. The seat of the Council was formalized in 2002, basing it in Brussels. In addition to usual European Councils, there are the occasional extraordinary meetings, as for example in 2001 when the European Council gathered to lead the EU's response to the 11 September attacks.

Some meetings of the European Council are seen by some as turning points in the history of the European Union. For example:

• 1969, The Hague: Foreign policy and enlargement.
• 1974, Paris: Creation of the Council.
• 1985, Milan: Initiate IGC leading to the Single European Act.
• 1991, Maastricht: Agreement on the Maastricht Treaty.
• 1993, Copenhagen: Leading to the definition of the Copenhagen Criteria.
• 1997, Amsterdam: Agreement on the Amsterdam Treaty.
• 1998, Brussels: Selected member states to adopt the euro.
• 1999; Cologne: Declaration on military forces.
• 1999, Tampere: Institutional reform
• 2000, Lisbon: Lisbon Strategy
• 2002, Copenhagen: Agreement for May 2004 enlargement.
• 2007, Lisbon: Agreement on the Lisbon Treaty.
• 2009, Brussels: Appointment of first President and merged High Representative.
• 2010, European Financial Stability Facility

As such, the European Council had already existed before it gained the status as an institution of the European Union with the entering into force of the Treaty of Lisbon. Indeed, Article 214(2) of the Treaty establishing the European Community provided (before it was amended by the Treaty of Lisbon) that ‘the Council, meeting in the composition of Heads of State or Government and acting by a qualified majority, shall nominate the person it intends to appoint as President of the Commission’ (emphasis added); this may be seen as an early codification of the European Council in the Treaties. In the event, Article 15 of the Treaty on European Union (amended by the Treaty of Lisbon) officially introduces the term European Council as a substitute for the phrase "Council meeting in the composition of the Heads of State or Government", which was previously sometimes used in the treaties to refer to this body.

The Treaty of Lisbon made the European Council a formal institution distinct from the (ordinary) Council of the EU, and created the present longer term and full-time presidency. As an outgrowth of the Council of the EU, the European Council had previously followed the same Presidency, rotating between each member state. While the Council of the EU retains that system, the European Council established, with no change in powers, a system of appointing an individual (without them being a national leader) for two-and-a-half-years. Following the ratification of the treaty in December 2009, the European Council elected the then-Prime Minister of Belgium Herman Van Rompuy as its first permanent President (resigning from Belgian Prime Minister).