In the second or intergovernmental stage, national governments bring their preferences to the bargaining table in Brussels, where agreements reflect the relative power of each member state, and where supranational organizations such as the Commission exert little or no influence over policy outcomes. By contrast with neo-functionalists, who emphasized the entrepreneurial and brokering roles of the Commission and the upgrading of the common interest among member states in the Council, Moravcsik and other intergovernmentalists emphasized the hardball bargaining among member states and the importance of bargaining power, package deals, and ‘side payments’ as determinants of intergovernmental bargains on the most important EU decisions.
Third and finally, Moravcsik puts forward a rational choice theory of institutional choice, arguing that EU member states adopt particular EU institutions-pooling sovereignty through QMV, or delegating sovereignty to supranational actors like the Commission and the Court-in order to increase the credibility of their mutual commitments.
In this view, sovereign states seeking to cooperate among themselves invariably face a strong temptation to cheat or ‘defect’ from their agreements. Pooling and delegating sovereignty through international organizations, he argues, allows states to commit themselves credibly to their mutual promises, by monitoring state compliance with international agreements and filling in the blanks of broad international treaties, such as those that have constituted the EC/EU.
In empirical terms, Moravcsik argues that the EU’s historic intergovernmental agreements, such as the 1957 Treaties of Rome and the 1992 Treaty on European Union (TEU), were not driven primarily by supranational entrepreneurs, unintended spillovers from earlier integration, or transnational coalitions of interest groups, but rather by a gradual process of preference convergence among the most powerful member states, which then struck central bargains among themselves, offered side-payments to smaller member states, and delegated strictly limited powers to supranational organizations that remained more or less obedient servants of the member states.