Mission Impossible? The Potential for Franco–German Leadership in the Enlarged EU

This article examines the potential for Franco–German leadership in the EU‐27. Leadership in the sense of shared leadership to achieve collective European goals can be exercised in different ways: by promoting the deepening and/or widening of European integration, by the active search for European compromises on disputed issues or by means of crisis management in European affairs. The Franco–German potential for performing such a leading role inside the European Union can be seen as being a function of French and German formal and informal power resources, of the shape of the institutional environments in different EU policy fields, of the prevailing preference configurations and issue coalitions in the Council and of the deliberate political strategies of French and German political leaders. The article analyses how far the enlargement of the European Union to 27 Member States has eroded the combined leadership capacities of France and Germany. Under specific conditions and circumstances – which should be less frequent in the EU‐27 than before – the two European core countries might still be able to provide the kind of leadership which an enlarged Union needs perhaps more than ever.