03/03/2026
On 12 February, EU leaders met at Alden Biesen Castle for an informal competitiveness retreat. While the headlines focused on completing the Single Market, Professor Alberto Alemanno, founder of The Good Lobby, argues that something far more consequential emerged from the meeting.
In “The Castle Method: Achieving Treaty Change Without Treaty Revision,” published on Verfassungsblog, Alemanno shows how the joint declaration goes beyond simplification. Beneath its technical language lie commitments to reshape how EU law is drafted, delegated, reviewed, and repealed – including a preference for regulations over directives, limits on delegated acts, systematic sunset clauses, and annual reporting by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to the European Council.
Taken together, these steps risk altering the EU’s institutional balance – the constitutional principle that protects the distribution of powers between institutions and safeguards the integrity of the legislative process. Crucially, they do so without activating the formal Treaty revision procedure under Article 48 TEU.
Alemanno calls this approach the “castle method”: achieving Treaty-level institutional change through informal summit declarations, Commission communications, and soft-law instruments – bypassing the visibility, deliberation, and democratic safeguards of formal reform, such as those used for the Single European Act.
At stake is not just simplification, but democratic accountability and the rule of law in the EU.