The European Council’s playbooks for dealing with major challenges

This article provides a comparative assessment of the role of the European Council in dealing with major strategic challenges. It provides a structured, focused comparison of the European Council’s role and involvement in the challenges of migration, European industries, capital markets and defence. We contend that such major challenges ask for a very different approach from the urgent, event-driven and short-term-oriented politics of crisis management. Strategic challenges demand the continued attention of the European Council over an extended period of time, and require extensive involvement with normal policymaking processes within the other EU institutions. This article analyses the playbooks that have been developed for dealing with the two central problems of sustaining political attention and maintaining organizational impetus, cataloguing similarities and differences across the four cases. This allows us to assess whether stable patterns of action can be discerned that are congruent with the ‘normalization’ thesis of this special issue.