Blocking Minorities: Networks and Meaning in the Opposition Against the Proposal for a Directive on Temporary Work in the Council of Ministers of the European Union*

Abstract

Abstract This article contains a case study of the behaviour of a blocking minority in the Council of Ministers. The article demonstrates that the behaviour of the Member States cannot be explained directly in this case by domestic circumstances and interests, as is often done, for example, in the liberal intergovernmentalist literature. Instead, the alternative explanations offered in this article are tight networks and their ability to create meaning in being part of the blocking minority through an attractive storyline. If generalized, this means that the influence of storylines created by discourse‐coalitions must be upgraded as explanations of the behaviour in the Council of Ministers and that Member States providing the network with hegemony can critically strengthen an issue network. These factors have previously been overlooked in the literature on the Council of Ministers.