Defiance for European Influence—the Empty Chair and France

This chapter covers the Empty Chair crisis, the context of events leading up to the crisis, and its impact and implications on European integration. It begins with an account of the events leading up to the crisis, which was triggered by the 1965 EEC Council meeting. The issue to be solved was that of the financing rules for the common agricultural policy (CAP), although the chapter soon reveals that much more was at stake for France as well as the other Member States. One observer notes that the conflict ‘centred, more fundamentally, on the question of the governance of the Community (to use the modern phrase). The legal basis of the Commission’s activities and its independence were both in the balance’.