EU Council Crisis game offside

Natan’s simple yet effective game on the EU Council responding to an external crisis provided a very interesting experience. Nick L, Thomas D. and I played EU council members. It didn’t really matter much which, because our hidden roles, respectively ‘Dove’, ‘Rat’ and ‘Hawk’ were to determine our stance.

Sophie on the other hand would play the ‘Rival’, the outside force creating the crisis. Let’s say it was a declining world hegemon demanding control over a large island in the north Atlantic, and provoking responses by direct and indirect threats.

At first we negotiated our response within the limits of the issue at hand, but Natan gave us the option to alter our negotiating stance (a nbit) to gain concessions on other issues (eg consessions on fishery rights or the appointment of a countryman to an important EU position), which we further referred to as IOUs. We didn’t use many, because we seemed to be able to negotiate common positions quite well within the issue, and we all had the option to propose one reaction each during a round, so there was negotiating room there as well. I believe in negotiation theory this is called enlargening the ‘negotiation space’. Natan confirmed this is a common EU negotiation strategy.

In the end, Sophie, as the rival, seemed to be mostly sabre rattling and we felt that actual escalation was limited. That didn’t up the ante enough to drive us apart. It did however give us an interesting insight into extraterritorial rights of said declining hegemon on the large island in the north Atlantic.

A thoughts I had afterwards [I didn’t say all of it in the debrief, but let’s not waste hindsight]:
For a short game, to keep up speed, you might want to prepare an umpire-controlled ‘Rival’ rather than have them played. There was a bit of downtime for the EU team when we waited for the Rival to come up with a new set of provocations, and vice versa when we prepared our response. Preparing the Rival also allows the game control to better fit the speed of escalation to the time you have. The EU Council is the part you want to concentrate the game on.
Don’t consider this an unfinished game, but as a first version. Use each following iteration as a slightly modified version of the core game. Change the rules and options for the players and note the effects of different ‘negotiation spaces’ that has on the process and the result. In that way it becomes more of an controlled experiment, and a better tool for both teaching and analysis.

Many thanks to Natan for putting on the game. I got to dust off some of my arcane EU rules knowledge and enjoyed the to and fro within the council.

I also enjoy the online sessions. Many thanks to Sophie for making it possible.