Is the ‘Hard Bargaining’ Image of the Council Misleading? The Committee of Permanent Representatives and the Local Elections Directive

The quiet evolution of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) into a de facto decision‐making body has received surprisingly little attention from integration researchers. Even less attention has been paid to the novel institutional form and underlying rationality of this forum at the interface between the national and Community levels. This article argues that Coreper maintains the performance of the Council through the production of a distinct culture of compromise and community‐method. The result, empirically demonstrated in a case study of the 1994 local elections directive, is a shared commitment to finding solutions, where membership in the collective decision‐making process has become part of the rational calculus of defining and defending self‐interests. These findings suggest the need to modify the ‘hard bargaining’ image of EU decision‐making.