Talking cheap, or speaking Euro? Assessing congruence between leaders’ communication and negotiators’ positioning in the Eurozone crisis*

Whether European leaders ‘talk the walk’ is a key question in EU studies. Prior research has made substantial inroads into explaining how EU and national leaders communicate about European integration, as well as what positions member states and EU institutions take in EU negotiations and why. However, we do not know to what extent leaders’ communication is congruent with what their negotiators do in Brussels, nor what explains such (in)congruence. This article presents a first dive into these questions. It formulates two theoretical arguments on why leaders’ communication and negotiation positions may diverge: accidentally, due to coordination costs, or intentionally, due to strategic and electoral calculations. Leveraging three novel databases on the Eurozone crisis, we come to two important conclusions: first, the degree of incongruence is substantial and similar to what is found at the national level. Second, our results favour a political-strategic argument for incongruence, but many important questions remain.

欧洲领导人是否"言行一致"是欧盟（European Union）研究领域的核心议题。过往研究已就欧盟与各国领导人如何就欧洲一体化议题开展沟通，以及成员国与欧盟机构在欧盟谈判中的立场及其成因作出阐释，并取得了显著进展。然而，目前学界尚未明确：领导人的沟通内容与其布鲁塞尔谈判代表的实际行动之间的契合程度究竟如何，以及此类（非）契合现象的成因是什么。本文首次针对上述问题展开探究，并针对领导人沟通内容与谈判立场产生分歧的两类成因构建了理论框架：一类是偶然因素，源于协调成本；另一类是有意为之，基于战略考量与选举算计。借助三个针对欧元区危机（Eurozone crisis）的全新数据库，本文得出两项重要结论：其一，非契合程度相当显著，且与国家层面的相关研究发现相近；其二，研究结果支持关于非契合现象的政治战略阐释，但仍有诸多关键问题有待解答。