How can EU leaders be persuaded to engage in proper political discussion? The problem is particularly acute for the traditional March European Council, tasked with dealing with economic policy.

Work leading to this summit starts with the publication by the European Commission of the key policy recommendations (Annual Growth Survey) for the member states. These then make their way through different ministerials – employment, financial, competition – all of which have their say.

The EU leaders at the March summit “endorse”  certain broad stroke  “priorities”  such as promoting “growth” or tackling “unemployment”. They reader thinks ‘déjà vu’ and ‘blindingly obvious’ in equal measure.

The loose conclusions are not due to the issues themselves. They are important. The problem is getting the EU leaders to talk about them properly.

This is partly due to having 27 people sitting around the table and partly due to a tacit agreement nobody should ruffle anybody else’s feathers.

One diplomat summed it up so: “I have been at a lot of these Spring Councils and the problem is how do you make them politically interesting to leaders in a way that you can promote a real debate. It is difficult to get people to talk about the nuts and bolts.”

Herman Van Rompuy, European Council President and tasked with ‘driving forward’ meetings of EU leaders, has been grappling with this since he took on the job in early 2010.

His answer:  An ‘Issues Paper’ that he has circulated to member states ahead of today’s summit. It tells member states where they should be doing more and relies on charts to make the point crystal clear.

Take research investment, for example.  “For many Member States … prioritization on R&D remains a challenge” says the text. Directly underneath is a helpful little graph showing just who is not rising to the challenge (Malta, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Latvia)

Or

“European venture capital markets remain underdeveloped, and patenting especially sluggish in some parts of Europe.” (That’s you Greece, Czech Republic, Hungary and Ireland).

“I think there is an effort to try and get an element of peer review into Europe2020 (the EU’s longterm economic goals) When you look at the charts you can see who is doing well and who is not. To some extent this is supposed to provoke Prime Ministers into saying ‘well, we’re not doing well on that chart but there’s a reason for it. Or we addressing that by doing X, Y and Z’,” said one EU official.

The wider context works in favour of Rompuy’s indirect naming and shaming. The eurozone crisis, with its Greek origins, has made it clear just what can happen when a blind eye is turned and details are ignored. More broadly, the lax oversight on the EU’s last 10-year economic programme, the Lisbon Agenda, saw goals come and go and left the EU very much not the world’s most dynamic economy by 2010.

And some member states have just had a taste of this type of unasked-for publicity. The Commission’s Alert Mechanism Report, part of the new six-pack of budgetary surveillance legislation in force since December, named 12 countries that could be sitting on economic timebombs.

Both the naming and the detail of the report – dubbed “hard-hitting” by an official from one of the listed countries – are being seen by some as the start of new ‘gloves-off’ era.

Still, a revolution is not in the offing.

An initial draft of the conclusions suggested member states welcomed the report. Upon further reflection, they decided it was worthy of ‘examination’ only.