Why take ‘No’ for an answer? Solana plan can take sting out of Nice nettle

Date: 13/06/02

Europe must prepare itself for a second Nice 'no' vote from the Irish later this year by reforming its institutions and updating accession treaties. Javier Solana's recent initiatives should help the process, argues Dick Leonard.

THE agenda for the 21-22 June Seville summit has not yet been finalised, but one item at least is sure to be included.

At the urgent request of Ireland's Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern, the EU heads of government will be invited to approve a declaration that nothing in the Treaty of Nice will prejudice his country's tradition of neutrality.

Ahern considers this necessary because the alleged threat to Ireland's neutral status was one of a number of extraneous issues which appeared to influence the result of the first referendum on ratifying the treaty, in June 2001.

If he is to have any hope of reversing this verdict in a second referendum, due in October or November this year, he wants to clear away as many of these 'red herrings' as possible, well ahead of the poll.

He will certainly get the declaration at Seville, but the prospects for success in the referendum do not appear all that encouraging.

The general election last month, which confirmed Ahern in office, was hardly good news for the pro-European cause.

The opposition Fine Gael party, which is the strongest advocate of European integration, suffered a crushing defeat, losing 42 of its seats.

By contrast, the two parties most opposed to the Nice Treaty - Sinn Fein and the Greens - both made significant advances.

Ratification was not a live issue in the election, but an opinion poll taken just before polling day showed a three-way split - with 32 in favour of the treaty, 32 against, and 32 undecided.

A mere 4 said they would not vote.

It is too soon to conclude that the referendum is already lost, but the EU would do well to prepare a contingency plan in the event of a defeat.

This should include two elements. The first would be to insert into the accession treaties with the new member states those clauses of the Nice Treaty most directly affecting enlargement.

The second element would be to press ahead without delay with those reforms to EU institutions which do not require treaty amendments.

In this respect, the recent initiative by Javier Solana, the secretary-general of the Council of Ministers and the EU's foreign policy chief, is to be applauded.

In a little-noticed move, he submitted a paper to the Barcelona summit in March, setting out proposals for improving EU decision-making in four different areas.

The heads of government responded by appointing a committee of personal representatives to mull over Solana's ideas with him, in the hope of producing an agreed programme of reforms to be endorsed at Seville.

This committee has almost completed its work, and will submit a preliminary report on Monday (17 June) to the council of foreign ministers, who will 'pre-cook' it before it is considered at Seville later in the week.

Solana is optimistic that the go-ahead will be given for significant improvements in three of the four areas he pinpointed for reform.

The first concerns the conduct of meetings of the European Council, which should be, in his words, 'the Union's supreme political authority'.

Yet, he told the Barcelona Council, 'it has been sidetracked from its original purpose...it is increasingly asked to spend time on laborious low-level drafting work', while its meetings have been reduced to 'report-approval sessions or inappropriate exercises in self-congratulation by the institutions'.

Solana proposes a ruthless pruning of summit agendas, cutting out reports from other EU institutions, ancillary meetings with third parties, formal lunches or dinners with heads of state or 'parasitic procedures that clog up meetings'.

There should be, he argues, a radical reduction in the size of delegations, and regular meetings (four times a year) should be seen as 'working meetings forming part of the normal pattern of the Union's activities'.

Other - shorter - meetings, similar to the one held in Brussels after the 11 September attacks, should be convened on an ad hoc basis to deal with crises or to consider specific issues in depth.

The European Council normally proceeds on the basis of consensus, but Solana is hoping that it will agree to apply qualified majority voting, on the same basis

as in the Council of Ministers, in order to facilitate decision-taking.

Another EU institution which is not functioning properly, in Solana's view, is the General Affairs Council (GAC).

This is made up of foreign ministers and is meant to coordinate the activities of all the other ministerial councils. Perhaps it did so successfully in the early years of the European Economic Community, but now its members' energies are so taken up with a welter of foreign policy issues that they no longer have the time or inclination to play this role.

Solana's solution is to split the GAC into two.

One section - the External Affairs Council - would incorporate, where appropriate, defence, development and foreign trade ministers, as well as foreign ministers.

The other, which would retain the title of GAC, would be made up of personal representatives of each prime minister, and would have the task of supervising and mediating between all the other councils, which would be reduced from 16 to about ten in number.

One object would be to reduce the extent to which European Councils became a 'court of appeal' for lower level ministerial councils.

The third proposal is meant to increase transparency in the Council of Ministers, particularly when it is operating as a legislative body.

Whenever the Council is considering proposals, for which the co-decision procedure with the European Parliament is applicable, it should meet in public, both for the initial presentation of the proposal, and for the final vote and explanations of votes, Solana suggests.

Solana's fourth concern is with the conduct of the presidency, but he concedes that most improvements would involve treaty revision, so he has confined himself to a handful of procedural recommendations.

His overall prescriptions are hardly world-shaking, but they add up to a useful programme for making the EU more effective.

Quite apart from the challenge of enlargement, they would still be highly desirable even if the membership of the Union were to remain at 15.

Major feature. Europe must prepare itself for a second 'no' vote from the Irish by reforming its institutions and updating accession treaties. Author argues that Javier Solana's recent initiatives should help the process.