Promoting policy consistency and continuity in the EU through the trio: Alcohol-related harm on the council presidency agenda

Abstract

To what extent has the new trio group presidency model that was implemented in 2007 contributed to improved policy consistency and continuity in the European Union (EU)? This article addresses this question by comparing the role alcohol, as a health and social policy issue, has played on the agenda of individual national and trio Council presidencies since the EU Alcohol Strategy was adopted in 2006. Based on systematic analyses of 21 national and 7 trio Council presidency work programmes in the period between 2007 and 2017, the article concludes that the new trio presidency model has led to improved policy consistency and continuity through its promotion of the wider EU agenda, thus contributing to strengthen the image of the Council as a ‘club’. The close relationship between the European Commission and the trio presidencies in the preparation of the joint trio work programmes is here a key factor.

Keywords

Agenda-setting alcohol-related harm Council presidency European Union national and trio work programmes policy consistency and continuity

Introduction

The presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU) has rotated among the member states in 6-month terms since the 1950s.¹ This curious and unusual arrangement has been subject to considerable criticism but it has also been actively defended by many member states (Crum, 2009; Kollman, 2003; Tallberg, 2003). A principal concern is that the rotating presidency due to diverse national priorities and interests may hinder the necessary policy consistency and continuity that is required to tackle pressing challenges in an increasingly complex union (Batory and Puetter, 2013). Therefore, a new rotation system based on three member states collaborating during 18-month intervals was introduced in 2007 to complement the individual national presidencies (Council of the European Union, 2006b). The overriding purpose of this article is to examine to what extent the new trio presidency model has contributed to improved policy consistency and continuity in the EU.

Focus will here be put on a major public health and social concern in Europe: alcohol-related harm. Alcohol consumption is, next to tobacco use, the most important risk factor for loss of healthy life years in high-income countries (World Health Organization (WHO), 2009). However, while alcohol as a health and social policy issue tentatively entered the EU policy agenda for the first time during the second half of the 1990s (Örnberg, 2009; Princen, 2007; Ugland, 2000, 2003b), the attention has since been unstable and transient (Ugland, 2011). Nevertheless, the same year as the decision to introduce the new trio presidency model was taken in 2006, the European Commission adopted a Communication setting out a common long-term EU strategy to support the member states in reducing alcohol-related harm (European Commission, 2006). The so-called EU Alcohol Strategy was subsequently endorsed by the Council and the European Parliament, thus indicating that a broad consensus had been achieved concerning the needs to address alcohol-related harm in the EU (Council of the European Union, 2006a; European Parliament, 2007). The Council welcomed the strategy as a major step towards a ‘comprehensive and coherent approach to tackle the adverse effects of excessive alcohol consumption’, and further called upon the member states to ‘provide their full support for the strategy set out by the Commission and facilitate its implementation at national and Community level’ (Council of the European Union, 2006a: 5). There is still a lack of research examining the extent to which the rotating presidencies are able to influence the attention devoted to different policy issues (Häge, 2017), and this article contributes to new knowledge by comparing the role alcohol as a health and social policy issue has played on the agenda of individual national and trio Council presidencies since the EU Alcohol Strategy was adopted by the Commission and endorsed by the Council in 2006.

Agenda-setting is a core function of the rotating Council presidency (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace, 1997), and although the presidency has not been conferred any formal powers of initiative, it can shape the EU policy agenda through processes of agenda-setting, agenda-structuring and agenda exclusion (Tallberg, 2003). The published presidency programmes remain the most direct and readily available source of information about presidency priorities (Häge, 2017), and both individual national and trio presidencies provide work programmes for their 6- and 18-month terms. Although the programmes vary in length, structure, style and detail, they carry both symbolic weight by signalling the political priorities towards a specific policy issue, as well as practical weight by shaping the political attention that will be devoted to these issues in the numerous meetings organized and chaired by the presidencies.

This article focuses on the Council presidency agenda-shaping by systematically analysing 21 individual national work programmes and 7 joint trio work programmes in the period between 2007 and 2017. The 28 programmes were subject to quantitative/qualitative content analysis (Krippendorff, 2013), where all occurrences of the concept of ‘alcohol’ were identified and counted, and then interpreted and analysed to discern patterns existing within and between successive national and trio Council presidency work programmes across the specified time period (see Table 1). Despite the methodological challenges associated with content analysis due to the traditional variation between Council presidency programmes in terms of length, structure, style and detail (Häge, 2017), comparative content analysis of national and trio programmes over the relatively short period of time covered in this study has the potential of providing more valid and reliable measurements of policy priorities. First of all, the seven trio programmes between 2007 and 2017 are quite similar and comparable. For instance, they all consist of two parts: Part I provides a strategic framework, while Part II represents the operational programme structured around the lines of the 10 configurations of the Council. Second, the individual national 6-month programmes have since 2007 been written in the context of the trio programmes, which provides a common framework that ‘reinforces continuity’ (Raik, 2015: 30).

Table 1.

‘Alcohol’ in national and trio presidency work programmes, 2007–2017*.

NationalPresidency	NationalProgramme	National Programme Text	Trio	Trio Programme	Trio Presidency Programme Text
Germany (Jan–Jun 2007)	No	N/A	Trio 1	Yes	‘In the field of health promotion and disease prevention, the Presidencies will address specific health issues such as promotion of mental health, alcohol abuse and alcohol related harm, injury prevention, healthcare associated infections and promotion of healthy diets and physical activity, in particular for children and adolescents’ (p. 42).
Portugal (Jul–Dec 2007)	No	N/A
Slovenia (Jan–Jun 2008)	No	N/A
France (Jul–Dec 2008)	No	N/A	Trio 2	Yes	‘Health promotion and disease prevention is at the core of public health policy in Europe. In the context of the implementation of the Community strategy for reducing alcohol related harm and the continued action against smoking increased attention will be paid to alcohol consumption and use of tobacco products by children and adolescents’ (p. 46).
Czech Republic (Jan–Jun 2009)	No	N/A
Sweden (Jul–Dec 2009)	Yes	‘Another issue is the implementation of the EU alcohol strategy. The Commission is due to present its first progress report on the implementation of the strategy at national and European level. The ambition is to establish long-term prevention efforts for alcohol-related harm’ (p. 28).
Spain (Jan–Jun 2010)	No	N/A	Trio 3	Yes	‘While fully respecting the principle of subsidiarity, work will be undertaken in the field of social determinants of health and the reduction of inequalities; an important concern for the Presidencies will be the promotion of healthy lifestyles, including healthy nutritional habits. Measures against obesity and prevention of addictions (e.g. smoking, alcohol drinking, drugs etc.) as well as special health needs of children, adolescents and vulnerable groups will also be addressed’ (p. 39).
Belgium (Jul–Dec 2010)	No	N/A
Hungary (Jan–Jun 2011)	No	N/A
Poland (Jul–Dec 2011)	No	N/A	Trio 4	Yes	‘In the area of health determinants, special attention will be given to anti-tobacco policies, nutrition and physical activity, rare diseases and alcohol related harm.’ ‘A possible’: Commission proposal for a revision of the EU strategy on alcohol and health could be also be discussed’ (p. 33).
Denmark (Jan–Jun 2012)	No	N/A
Cyprus (Jul–Dec 2012)	No	N/A
Ireland (Jan–Jun 2013)	No	N/A	Trio 5	No	N/A
Lithuania (Jul–Dec 2013)	No	N/A
Greece (Jan–Jun 2014)	No	N/A
Italy (Jul–Dec 2014)	No	N/A	Trio 6	No	N/A
Latvia (Jan–Jun 2015)	Yes	‘The Presidency will follow the work of the Committee on National Alcohol Policy and Action, and is in the process of developing a scoping paper on the vision of future actions to be taken in the area of an alcohol policy in the EU. The Presidency will put in the effort required to bring the attention of EU health ministers to issues regarding alcohol and nutrition during the informal meeting of health ministers’ (p. 21).
Luxembourg (Jul–Dec 2015)	No	N/A
Netherlands (Jan–Jun 2016)	No	N/A	Trio 7	No	N/A
Slovakia (Jul–Dec 2016)	No	N/A
Malta (Jan–Jun 2017)	No	N/A

Emphasis added in the alcohol quotes from the Presidency and Trio programmes.

The plan of the article is as follows. The next section presents a framework for how the notion of policy consistency and continuity can be conceptualized and analysed in the context of Council presidency agenda-shaping. Section ‘Alcohol-related harm on the EU policy agenda’ reviews the agenda-shaping role of the rotating Council presidency in the area of alcohol-related harm. Section ‘Promoting policy consistency and continuity through the trio?’, in turn, examines to what extent the new trio presidency model has contributed to provide greater consistency and continuity towards addressing alcohol as a health and social policy issue in the EU. The main conclusions and a discussion of potential implications for future research are presented in the final section.

Agenda-shaping, policy consistency and the rotating council presidency

According to the Oxford Dictionary (Oxford, 2010), continuity refers to ‘the unbroken and consistent existence or operation of something over time’ (p. 377). Consistency, in turn, has to do with whether actions and beliefs are coordinated or coherent from the point of view of some common objective (March, 1999: 134). A high degree of policy consistency and continuity, therefore, implies a strong internal match between the various activities, as well as between the activities and social functions or objectives associated with a specific policy issue over time (Ugland, 2003a; Ugland and Veggeland, 2006).

In a complex multi-level governance system like the EU, policy consistency and continuity challenges can be traced to potential tensions between and within institutions and actors at different levels (Duke, 2011). Focus is here on the horizontal aspects of consistency, that is, the policy coordination between the various member states, since diverging priorities among member states holding the rotating Council presidency represent a key challenge for policy consistency and continuity (Batory and Puetter, 2013). Research has, for instance, demonstrated how policy progress on a certain issue accelerated and stalled under different presidencies (Bunse, 2009; Wurzel, 1996).

The allocation of attention to a certain policy problem and agenda-setting is a necessary condition for decision-making (Princen, 2009), and stabilization of the agenda is consequently the first step towards increased policy consistency and continuity (Häge, 2017). The rotating Council presidency can shape and influence the EU policy agenda in three distinct ways: through agenda-setting (the introduction of new issues on the policy agenda), agenda-structuring (the emphasizing or de-emphasizing of issues already on the agenda) and agenda exclusion (the active barring of issues on the agenda; Tallberg, 2003: 5). Policy consistency and continuity is to a large extent a question of how items already on the political agenda are dealt with by successive Council presidencies, where manifestations of agenda-structuring and agenda exclusion can be identified through systematic analyses of the published presidency programmes.

The Council presidency agenda-shaping is related to more general perceptions of the Council, such as Helen Wallace’s (2002) contrasting images of the Council as competition versus a club. The rotating presidency can be used both to promote narrow exclusive and more shared national policy priorities. Increased policy consistency and continuity implies that common and already agreed-upon EU priorities are pursued among and between successive presidencies over time. Likewise, policy diversity is assumed to prevail if competing national priorities prevail. Competing theoretical perspectives provide different sets of explanations as to which one of these outcomes is likely. However, the new trio presidency model was introduced in order to strengthen the image of the Council as a club of governments which aims for consistency and continuity over policy as they converge in the desire to push through EU policies domestically and externally (Batory and Puetter, 2013).

According to Raik (2015), the launch of the trio programmes has actually led to a shift from a purely national to a wider common EU agenda in the Council presidency as the preparation of the joint programmes demand an intensive interaction and agreement among the group of three presidencies and several EU institutional actors. However, the links between the national and the trio programmes have so far received little scholarly attention. This article analyses the consistency and continuity between and across individual national and trio presidencies over time regarding a specific health and social policy issue: alcohol-related harm. To what extent the national and trio work programmes overlap in terms of the attention paid to alcohol policy is a key question that will be systematically addressed. Both the fact that the trio programmes have been said to reflect the combined national priorities of the three presidencies (Warntjen, 2013), and the expectation that the trio programmes will provide a reference point for the national programmes (Batory and Puetter, 2013) may sugggest a strong overlap between the two programmes.

The second section ‘Alcohol-related harm on the EU policy agenda’

The Finnish and Swedish Council presidencies as policy entrepreneurs

Under the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ and given the limitations of the Treaties, the development of comprehensive health policies is primarily the responsibility of the member states (Greer, 2009). In fact, because of the sensitivity of health matters, the member states have often been unwilling to permit the EU a wider role in public health. Nevertheless, the EU has been granted certain formal competencies in public health over the course of time. The Treaty on the European Union (the Maastricht Treaty) in 1992 formalized the first real powers with respect to public health, giving the Community concrete legal competencies through two provisions. Article 3(o) empowered the Community to ‘contribute to the attainment of a high level of health protection’ for its citizens. Second, and towards achieving this objective, Article 129 delineated a rudimentary framework whereby the Community could meet this obligation. It could do so by encouraging cooperation between member states and, if necessary, lending support to their actions. The Amsterdam Treaty from 1997 revised Article 129, and several new provisions were added. Article 129 was in this connection renamed Article 152. Furthermore, Article 152 of the EC Treaty was replaced by Article 168 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

According to Article 168, the Council can adopt recommendations for the purpose of improving public health, preventing human illnesses and diseases, and obviating sources of danger to human health. Council recommendations enable the EU institutions to express a particular view to the various member states but they are not binding instruments. This implies that the party to whom a recommendation is addressed is placed under no legal obligation to behave in a particular way. The significance of these recommendations is therefore not legal but they may carry political and moral weight. Furthermore, they can be used to expand EU activities into new areas because of the flexibility they offer to the member states where the national situation may differ substantially.

Alcohol policy – defined as all public measures pertaining to the relation between alcohol, health and social welfare (Babor et al., 2010) – has not figured high on the political agenda in the EU or in most member states. Although Europe carries a particularly heavy burden of alcohol-related problems (Rehn et al., 2001), alcoholic beverages have most often been treated as economic commodities to be promoted, and few systematic attempts have been made to redress adverse health and social policy consequences in the EU (Ugland, 2003a). ‘Alcohol policy’ as a health and social policy-oriented concept was traditionally not even included in the policy vocabulary in most of the member states (Fahrenkrug, 1990). As a result, some observers concluded early that ‘an all-European alcohol agenda is unlikely to emerge’ (Simpura, 1997: 40). However, this prediction was challenged after Finland and Sweden joined the EU in 1995 through the so-called Northern enlargement.

Since the early twentieth century, alcohol policy has been regarded as an independent area of public policy in both Finland (alkoholipolitiikka) and Sweden (alkoholpolitik). Moreover, Finnish and Swedish alcohol policies have been portrayed as unique in an EU context, and they were said to reflect some distinctive cultural traditions and historical experiences (Kurzer, 2001). In these countries, alcohol was traditionally used as a drug for intoxication, and moderate drinking in connection with meals was not common. Historically, alcohol symbolized moral degradation, poverty and social disorder, while temperance was considered a key to a better life, a sign of high social morality and general welfare in the Nordic countries (Mäkelä and Tigerstedt, 1993: 193). The emergence of the restrictive alcohol policies was rooted in the nation-building projects, and they were associated with important social forces such as the labour movement, various Low Church groups, and a strong and independent temperance movement. The pith and substance of Finnish and Swedish alcohol policies was that alcoholic beverages were not like any other commodities, and that they therefore had to be subject to a distinct set of commercial principles. Based on a common set of values, a wide range of preventive strategies have been adopted in attempts to achieve the main objective of reducing the prevalence of both acute and chronic alcohol-related harm in society. By the 1980s, the most important were: state monopoly control over import, export, production, wholesale and retail sale of alcoholic beverages; high levels of taxation; complete or partial bans on advertising; age-limits on purchasing and selling; restrictions on selling hours; strict rules governing licensing permits for restaurants; and general health information about the harmful effects of alcoholic beverages.

Article 168 has been used to justify measures pertaining to advancement of new alcohol, health and social policy measures in the EU, and both Finland and Sweden have played key roles in putting alcohol-related harm on the EU agenda. The first Finnish and Swedish presidencies of the Council were particularly important in this respect. In the work programme of the Finnish presidency in 1999, alcohol was specifically linked to the new Treaty developments:

The Treaty of Amsterdam strengthens the obligation to ensure a high level of protection for human health in all Community policies and activities. Finland stresses the horizontal nature of initiatives related to the fight against infectious diseases, pharmaceutical issues and initiatives related to alcohol, tobacco and drugs. (Council of the European Union, 1999: 27)

Furthermore, in a meeting held in connection with the Finnish presidency, the Council of Ministers of Health discussed for the first time the need to address the issue of young people and alcohol through a Council recommendation (Ugland, 2003b). This initiative was a direct result of cooperation between the Finnish and Swedish governments, which had already exchanged letters in 1997 about the possibility of launching the EU funded ECAS (European Comparative Alcohol Study) project in connection with the Finnish presidency in order to build support for EU alcohol policy measures (Örnberg, 2008).

Although the Finnish presidency of the Council during the second half of 1999 played an important role in putting alcohol-related harm on the EU policy agenda for the first time, alcohol was not mentioned in the work programme of the Portuguese presidency immediately following the Finnish presidency. However, alcohol-related harm was included in the subsequent French and Swedish work programmes in 2000 and 2001. In fact, the French government encouraged the Swedish government in political talks to use the Council presidency to put alcohol-related harm more prominently on the EU agenda (Ugland, 2003b). In response, the Swedish Council presidency work programme stated that ‘Sweden wants to actively contribute to a Community strategy to reduce the harmful effects of alcohol’ (Council of the European Union, 2001c: 17).

Several concrete alcohol policy initiatives were adopted during the Swedish presidency. First of all, the Council adopted a Recommendation on the drinking of alcohol by young people (Council of the European Union, 2001b). This Recommendation invited the Commission to follow up, assess and monitor developments and the measures taken and to report back on the need for further actions. Second, in its Conclusions of 5 June 2001, the Council also invited the Commission to put forward proposals for a comprehensive Community strategy aimed at reducing alcohol-related harm to complement national policies (Council of the European Union, 2001a).

The Council presidency can set the agenda in the EU by raising the awareness of previously neglected problems in European cooperation (Tallberg, 2003). Alcohol-related harm was such a problem, and both the Finnish (1999) and Swedish (2001) Council presidencies acted as policy entrepreneurs by introducing the issue on the EU policy agenda. Furthermore, the process resulted in the adoption of concrete proposals for future policymaking in this area of public policy. According to then Swedish Minister of Health and Social Affairs, the EU approach to alcohol policy changed during the Swedish presidency: ‘Previously, alcohol-related issues were primarily regarded as a single-market, and agricultural concern. However, all the Member States now agree that alcohol should be regarded as a public health issue as well’.² Despite the early optimism after the successful agenda-setting of the Finnish and Swedish Council presidencies, alcohol was largely de-emphasized or excluded entirely from the EU policy agenda.

‘Up and down’ and ‘on and off’ with alcohol

The decreasing attention devoted to alcohol policy after the breakthrough year of 2001 is evident by the activities of both the Council and the European Commission. No initiatives were taken by the DG SANCO in order to transform the EU Alcohol Strategy from project to reality, and alcohol policy was excluded from the work programmes of the Council presidencies of Spain, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Ireland and Netherlands between January 2002 and December 2004; Ugland, 2011). The de-emphasis or exclusion of alcohol-related harm from the EU policy agenda confirms that, as one respondent who was involved with the Swedish Council presidency put it: ‘It is not a given that alcohol policy is on the EU policy agenda. You have to work hard for keeping it there’ (Ugland, 2011: 27).

The fact that the harmful use of alcohol has adverse health, social and economic consequences in all member states may promote consistency and continuity in the approach to alcohol policy among Council presidencies. However, drinking patterns and alcohol-related harm vary greatly between EU member states. Also, alcohol production and sales play different roles in the national economies of the member states. Both aspects may promote diversity in the approach to alcohol policy, and can therefore account for the lack of consistency and continuity.

However, the Commission, represented by then DG SANCO, started to take a more pro-active approach to alcohol-related harm in 2004, and in particular vis-à-vis the work on the common Alcohol Strategy. The appointment of a new Director General and the secondment of a Swedish alcohol policy expert to advance the work on the Alcohol Strategy were particularly important in bringing alcohol back on the EU policy agenda. As one respondent put it, ‘the EU system within the area of health is very small, and when it comes to alcohol policy, it is even smaller – so, individuals are important’ (Ugland, 2011: 27).

These developments within the Commission coincided with the inclusion of alcohol policy in the joint work programme for the 2005 Council presidencies of Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.³ Under the sub-title ‘Health’ the programme emphasized that ‘Other issues on which action may be taken are patient safety, epidemics, bioterrorism and alcohol’ (Council of the European Union, 2004: 22). The wording is more detailed in the joint work programme formulated prior to the 2006 presidencies of Austria and Finland: ‘Other issues which will be addressed are the Communication on nutrition and physical activity, the Alcohol Strategy Communication, mental health, adult-onset diabetes, women’s health’ (Council of the European Union, 2005: 30).

These statements were followed up by concrete initiatives, and the first comprehensive EU Alcohol Strategy to reduce alcohol-related harm in Europe was adopted by the European Commission in October 2006 during the second Finnish presidency of the Council (European Commission, 2006). This strategy identified five priority themes for action. The first priority related to the protection of young people, children and the unborn child and emphasizes the need to address the growing problem of under-age drinking and binge drinking among young people, but also to increase the protection of children. The strategy reiterates examples of good practice from the 2001 Council Recommendation, including the need to enforce restrictions on sales and action on the availability of marketing likely to influence young people. The second priority related to the need to reduce injuries and death from alcohol related to road accidents. The strategy highlighted, as good practice, the setting and enforcement of a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) maximum of 0.5 mg/ml for drivers of motorized vehicles and the setting of a lower limit for inexperienced and professional drivers. It also underlined the importance of awareness raising measures. The third priority addressed the importance of preventing alcohol-related harm among adults in order to decrease chronic physical and mental ill health in the adult population, giving particular recognition to the impact that alcohol can have on the workplace, and workforce productivity, and the importance of the workplace as a setting for intervention. As good practice, the strategy emphasized the need to enforce, across settings, existing regulations, codes and standards (such as licences, server training, restrictions on alcoholic drinks promotions) as well as campaigns to raise awareness and involving health professionals to advise people at risk. The fourth priority related to the need to inform, educate and raise awareness on the impact of harmful and hazardous alcohol consumption, so as to develop knowledge in society about appropriate consumption patterns. Finally, the fifth priority emphasized a continued commitment to work with partners to develop and maintain a common evidence base at the EU level, particularly in relation to the development of health indicators to monitor progress as well as studies to monitor the effectiveness of approaches.

The Council actively called upon the member states to support and implement the strategy at the national and Community level (Council of the European Union, 2006a). The response on this call among individual national and trio Council presidencies between 2007 and 2017 will be examined below.

The third section ‘Promoting policy consistency and continuity through the trio?’

The new trio model was first implemented in 2007, and it was formally recognized as the applicable standard model for running the rotating presidency of Council through the Lisbon Treaty that became effective in 2009 (Council of the European Union, 2006b). The trio was introduced to set long-term goals and prepare a common agenda determining the topics and major issues to be addressed by the Council over an 18-month period. On the basis of the trio work programmes, each of the three trio members was also expected to prepare their own more detailed national 6-month programmes. The main intention behind the new organization of the rotating presidency was to preserve individual member-state leadership while complementing it with incentives to cooperate more closely among a group of three in order to promote greater continuity and consistency over time. As argued by Batory and Puetter (2013), the Lisbon Treaty and the related internal regulations of the Council did not assign clearly specified responsibilities to the group and its constituent members apart from the general task to form a trio. It was therefore to a very large extent up to any given trio to fill the concept with meaning. However, the Council provided specific rules with respect to the preparation of the joint programmes. The Council’s Rules of Procedure (Art. 2(4)) adopted in 2006 stated that ‘every 18 months, the three presidencies due to hold office shall prepare, in close cooperation with the Commission, and after appropriate consultations, a draft programme of Council activities for that period. The three presidencies shall jointly submit the draft programme no later than one month before the relevant period’ (Council of the European Union, 2006b). Concerning the links between one trio programme and the next, a footnote to Article 2(4) instructs the three presidencies in charge of preparing a draft 18-month programme to consult with the three subsequent presidencies on the ‘general introductory section setting the programme in the context of the European Union’s longer-term strategic orientations’ (Council of the European Union, 2006b). Nothing is however mentioned about the need for consultations between the various trios on the operational programme (Part II), that is, on the various policy issues and dossiers which will be covered during the 18 months, and which are structured around the lines of the 10 configurations of the Council.

The European Council established a list of nine successive trio groups from 2007 to 2020, by which time all EU member states will have participated in a trio. The trio group formations institutionalized the partnership between old and new members, and considerations were also given to size and geographical location.

Trio 1 which consisted of Germany, Slovenia and Portugal between January 2007 and June 2008 addressed the issue of alcohol abuse and alcohol-related harm under the sub-title ‘Social Policy, Health and Consumers’ in the operational part of the common trio programme (see Table 1). However, no specific references were made to the EU Alcohol Strategy that had been adopted by the European Commission and endorsed by the Council in 2006. It is also interesting to note that alcohol was not mentioned in the national work programmes of any of the three presidencies composing the first trio.

Under the sub-title ‘Health and Consumers’, alcohol was also mentioned in the operational part of the joint programme of Trio 2 (France, Czech Republic and Sweden). Direct references were here made to both the EU Alcohol Strategy and the specific issue of alcohol consumption by young people which had been subject to a Council Recommendation in 2001. Alcohol was also addressed in the national work programme of the Swedish presidency. Under the title, ‘Full Employment and Good Health’, the programme stated that: ‘Another issue is the implementation of the EU alcohol strategy. The Commission is due to present its first progress report on the implementation of the strategy at national and European level. The ambition is to establish long-term prevention efforts for alcohol-related harm’ (Council of the European Union, 2009b: 28).

Coinciding with the Swedish Council presidency, 2009 was a very active year for EU alcohol policy. The Commission published a first progress report on the implementation of the common EU Alcohol Strategy in September 2009 (European Commission, 2009), and the Council invited the Commission and the member states to ‘keep public-health-based alcohol policy high on the agenda towards 2012 in order to build sustainable and long-term commitments to reduce alcohol-related harm at the EU level’ (Council of the European Union, 2009a: 5).

Despite this invitation, none of the six presidencies succeeding the Swedish between January 2010 and December 2012 included any references to alcohol in their national work programmes. However, both the joint programmes of Trio 3 (Spain, Belgium and Hungary) and Trio 4 (Poland, Denmark and Cyprus) addressed alcohol from a health and social policy perspective under the sub-title ‘Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs’. In the joint programme of Trio 4, the possibility of revising or replacing the adopted EU Alcohol Strategy that was intended to run through 2012 was also raised.

After the first progress report on the implementation of the EU Alcohol Strategy was published in 2009 (European Commission, 2009), an external evaluation concluded in 2012 that it was evident ‘that most Member States have updated and strengthened their alcohol strategies over the past six years, building on evidence-based measures and moving in the directions outlined in the EU strategy. Actions across society in the strategy’s priority themes, whether carried out as part of national public health policies or on a voluntary basis by stakeholders, can be expected, over the longer term, to contribute to reductions in alcohol-related harm’ (Zamparutti et al., 2012: 3). However, the European Commission signalled very early that they did not intend to produce a new alcohol strategy, and this may explain why the issue also more or less disappeared from the Council presidency agenda. After having been included in the operational part of four consecutive joint trio work programmes, alcohol was not mentioned by Trio 5 (Ireland, Lithuania and Greece – January 2013–June 2014), Trio 6 (Italy, Latvia and Luxembourg – July 2014–December 2015) or Trio 7 (Netherlands, Slovakia and Malta – January 2016–June 2017). Despite being absent from the three joint Trio programmes in this period, the Latvian presidency made specific references to EU alcohol policy in its national programme in 2015.

The analysis of the presidency work programmes demonstrates that despite the Council invitation to the member states to keep alcohol-related harm high on the EU agenda, alcohol-related harm has not figured prominently in the national programmes of the rotating presidencies of the Council during the 2007–2017 period. Only 2 (Sweden in 2009 and Latvia in 2015) of the past 21 national presidencies since 2007 raised the issue in their 6-month work programmes (Table 1). However, more consistency and continuity was provided through the joint trio programmes. Despite considerable variations between the first four trio formations in terms of scope and depth of coordination (Jensen and Nedergaard, 2014), all four included specific references to the prevention of alcohol-related harm as a priority issue. The issue only dropped off the trio presidency agenda after the Commission signalled that it would not replace the EU Alcohol Strategy after it expired in 2012.

The mismatch in attention paid to alcohol-related harm in the individual national and joint trio work programmes that has been exposed here is intriguing for several reasons. First, the lack of overlap in attention is surprising since the trio programme has been said to provide an ‘inventory of issues’ and a ‘roadmap and reference point’ for the national programmes (Batory and Puetter, 2013: 104). This is particularly true for the 6-month programmes of the second and third presidencies in the group, which are directly written in the context of the already published trio programme. Moreover, the first presidency in the trio group works in parallel on the trio programme and on its 6-month national programme, as they are published almost at the same time (Batory and Puetter, 2013; Raik, 2015). However, the mismatch in attention may indicate that individual programmes are more susceptible to agenda exclusion of wider EU priorities due to national sensitivities than trio programmes. After all, health and social policy-oriented alcohol measures are still highly controversial among national industries and electorates in many member states.

Second, the fact that alcohol-related harm was mentioned in the joint work programmes of Trios 1, 3 and 4 while it was completely excluded from the national programmes of the nine member states composing these trios challenges the notion that the trio presidency programmes ‘amount to nothing more than an “eclectic list” of national priorities’ (Warntjen, 2013: 1243). Instead, the trio programmes seem to be more aligned with the wider EU rolling policy agenda. According to Raik (2015), trio members increasingly take the approach that they are writing a programme ‘for the Council’, rather than agreeing on ‘their own joint political manifesto’ (p. 28). In this sense, the new trio presidency model has contributed to strengthen the image of the Council as a ‘club’ (see Wallace, 2002), which in turn will enhance policy consistency and continuity over time by promoting common EU rather than narrow national priorities. The trio presidency–European Commission nexus is here important. According to the Council’s Rules of Procedure, the trio programmes should be prepared in close cooperation with the Commission, which reinforces the strong role of the Commission as an agenda-setter vis-à-vis the Council in the EU legislative process (Puetter, 2014). This may explain why alcohol as a health and social policy issues was included in the joint programmes of the first four consecutive trios in the period between January 2007 and December 2012, a period which corresponds perfectly with the operation of the EU Alcohol Strategy which was adopted by the Commission in 2006. The fact that alcohol-related harm was dropped from the trio presidency agenda in 2013 after the Commission had decided not to replace the common EU Alcohol Strategy may be a further manifestation of the close relationship between the trio group presidency and the Commission.

Despite the Commissions reluctance to produce a new strategy to assist national governments in dealing with alcohol-related harm after the original strategy expired, other EU institutions have recently accentuated this need. In April 2015, the European Parliament made a call to the Commission ‘to begin work immediately’ on a new EU Alcohol Strategy for the 2016–2022 period (European Parliament, 2015). This call was in turn echoed by the 28 Health Ministers in December 2015, where the Council invited the Commission to adopt a new comprehensive common EU Alcohol Strategy ‘dedicated to the reduction of alcohol-related harm comprising action across EU policies in order to tackle health, social and economic consequences of the harmful use of alcohol’ (Council of the European Union, 2015: 5). The Council repeated the same message to the Commission in December 2017 (Council of the European Union, 2017: 10). To what extent the adoption of a new EU Alcohol Strategy by the Commission will bring back the issue on the agenda of the single national and trio presidencies remains to be seen. However, this article suggests that the partnership between the Commission and the Council presidency has been of great importance in putting alcohol policy more firmly on the EU agenda.

Conclusion

Although the role of the rotating presidency of the Council may be diminishing (Puetter, 2014), and continuity in the legislative work of the Council in many ways still remains an elusive goal also after the reforms introduced through the Treaty of Lisbon (Warntjen, 2013), the overriding conclusion in this article is that the new Trio presidency model has contributed to promote increased policy consistency and continuity in the EU. The close relationship between the European Commission and the trio presidencies in the preparation of the joint trio work programmes is here a key factor.

This conclusion is based on studies of the agenda-shaping function of the individual national and the joint trio Council presidencies by analysing and comparing their respective work programmes. It was beyond the scope of this article to analyse the link between the priorities highlighted in the work programmes and the actual actions and activities of the individual national presidencies. For instance, the role of the national programmes compared to the trio programmes in the actual legislative decision-making of the national presidencies on ministerial and working group level was not analysed. However, it has been argued that goals and objectives from the joint programmes only to a varying degree were linked to actual activities in the first four trio formations (Jensen and Nedergaard, 2014). Due to the temporal division between programme preparation and implementation, Batory and Puetter (2013) have further argued that there is a risk that long-term planning as embodied in 18-month programmes may be unrealistic given the fast-evolving national and EU legislative agendas. Moreover, Warntjen (2013) indicates that the trio programmes may provide a too broad outline to provide continuity in the legislative work of the Council. These are all topics that should be subject to further research with reference to the evolution of specific policy issues and areas at the EU level. Be that as it may, agenda-setting and the allocation of attention to a given policy problem serves as a precondition for policymaking (Princen, 2009). This article has demonstrated that the new trio presidency model has indeed contributed to put alcohol-related harm more firmly on the EU agenda, which represents the first step towards increased consistency and continuity in this important area of public health and social policy.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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