The Treaty of Lisbon has introduced major changes in the area of the European Union’s external relations. Aiming at establishing a unified representation and a stable leadership of EU foreign policy, the Treaty intends to reduce the role of the six-month rotating Presidency of the Council. This article reviews the literature regarding the roles of the rotating Presidency and examines in what ways and to what extent the Treaty of Lisbon may change these roles in the field of EU foreign policy. The empirical analysis looks at the experiences under the Belgian Presidency of the Council in 2010. It is argued that while the role of the country taking up the rotating Presidency is visually reduced, the Treaty of Lisbon has primarily transformed the role of the rotating Council Presidency in EU foreign policy.

The article analyses the internal coordination between the federal government, the Regions and the Communities in Belgium before and during the 2010 Belgian Presidency of the Council of Ministers. It starts from the observation that the absence of a federal government with full powers, the global financial-economic crisis as well as Belgium’s complex multi-level structure have, counterintuitively, not led to an ineffective internal coordination process. Based on interviews with people who were closely involved in the Belgian Presidency team, the article explains the effectiveness of the internal coordination by arguing that, on the one hand, the detailed and inclusive coordination before the Presidency semester has generated a culture of responsibility and joint ownership among the officials and diplomats and, on the other hand, the Belgian Presidency limited its role to being a facilitator of the European decision-making process in function of the rolling agenda of the Commission and the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty. Empirically illustrating these arguments with insights from the internal coordination in the environmental domain, this article demonstrates that an effective internal coordination, even in a difficult political context, can contribute to a successful Presidency.

Traditionally, Belgian EU Presidencies are characterized by an ambitious social agenda. It is, however, unclear to what extent these ambitions are translated into real policy accomplishments. In this article we aim to disentangle the genuine influence of the Belgian 2010 EU Presidency on the European social policy agenda by applying the agenda-shaping framework developed by Jonas Tallberg. Making use of elite interviews and by studying policy documents, we reach a twofold conclusion. First of all, the Belgian Presidency has left its footprints in some specific social policy topics, especially with regard to social impact assessment and child poverty. However, – in line with theoretical expectations – agenda-setting initiatives were less successful than agenda-structuring techniques. Secondly, our findings also shed preliminary light on the determinants of Presidency influence as identified by Simone Bunse. We find that the Belgian social ambitions were curtailed by political and economic constraints, policy preferences in the Council, the difficult inter-institutional dialogue (especially with the European Commission), and the limited Presidency skills of certain Belgian policy actors.