The EU budget process encourages deadlock and makes large reforms almost impossible. The best that reformers can hope for is gradual change

Ahead of tomorrow’s European Council summit to discuss the EU budget, Peter Becker assesses the prospects for EU heads of state and government reaching a deal. He argues that the negotiation process facilitates deadlock between member states because it is dominated by concerns over the net balance paid into the budget by individual countries. The process also makes reform extremely difficult as there is a large degree of ‘path-dependency’, where states that benefit from existing programmes are unwilling to agree to cuts in expenditure. In this context the best that can be hoped for is a gradual reconfiguration of EU spending.