Small States in EU Policy-Making

Small States in EU Policy-Making analyses how small states try to impact European Union policy-making through a range of strategies.

With the last rounds of enlargement and Brexit, the number and weight of small states in the European Union have steadily increased. At the same time, small states face distinct challenges in different institutions, which may impact their strategies. Nonetheless, the existing literature primarily focuses on the Council of the European Union and the European Council and offers few insights into how small states navigate the other institutions. The contributions to this volume examine how small states can wield influence in different institutions, arguing that they do indeed pursue different strategies depending on institutional context. The policy case studies on the EU’s foreign and security policies confirm these findings: small states can have influence in EU policy-making and can create situations where their needs are met. They are most likely to succeed when they build foreign policy coalitions, when they anticipate major economic developments and when they manage to acquire a high level of expertise in a policy area. However, the case studies also show that there is a risk of small states becoming policy-takers in cases where they cannot provide leadership in terms of ideas and expertise and/or fail to build political weight through coalitions.

This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners of European politics and the EU in particular, as well as policy-makers and practitioners working on small states.

The Open Access version of this book, available at , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Anna-Lena Högenauer is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Luxembourg. Her research focuses on questions of multilevel governance, EU politics and parliamentary democracy. She is Associate Editor of PRX and a member of the editorial boards of Politics and Governance and of Small States & Territories.

Matúš Mišík is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Comenius University Bratislava. His research interests include small states and energy security in the EU. He is the author of External Energy Security in the European Union (Routledge, 2019), co-author of Energy Transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (2024) and has published articles in journals including Nature Energy, Energy, Energy Policy and Geopolitics.

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