Small states coalition building in EU policy-making The cases of the Nordic and Baltic countries

Forming coalitions in various forms and shapes – institutionalized or ad hoc without any permanent structures, territorially constituted, i.e., consisting of countries from one region, or theme based – has become an important tool for small- and medium-sized EU member states in order to increase their political weight and impact in EU policy-making. On the basis of a conceptional and theoretical framework that distinguishes between different types of coalitions and the Baltic and Nordic EU member states as case studies, this chapter analyzes the use of coalitions for small states in an EU context along a number of examples of mainly regional coalitions. One important finding is that for defending their national interests Nordic and Baltic EU members’ governments overall seem to prefer flexible, issue-specific intergovernmental, non-institutionalized ad hoc coalitions consisting of a smaller number of like-minded countries. In contrast, while in the academic literature institutionalized coalitions and alliances are often labelled as the highest category of coalitions and indeed are good for informal consultations in a Nordic-Baltic context, in practice they do not seem to be preferred by these countries’ governments for negotiations in EU policy-making because of being not flexible enough or too small in terms of members.