Keeping the European faith

Date: 09/01/1997

As Klaus Hänsch, president of the European Parliament, completes his term of office next week, he looks back at the highlights of the last two and a half years.

AT THE Dublin European summit in December, I made my last speech as president of the European Parliament to the heads of state and government. The day before I chaired a session of Parliament for the final time.

On both of these occasions, I looked back over the past two and a half years, reflecting on the highlights of my presidency, on things achieved and not achieved, and on the challenges for the Parliament in the future.

Like the Parliament I have presided over, the presidency of the institution is a unique office, very different from the job of speaker in one of our national parliaments.

Chairing sessions is only one and not the most important part of the duties that go with the job. A president has to represent the Parliament to the governments of the member states, to the public and to the outside world.

I made it a feature of my presidency to concentrate my activities in the European Union. For that reason, I have made relatively few visits to countries outside the 15 member states.

On the other hand, I have undertaken no fewer than 40 visits to the regions of the EU outside its capital cities. For if the Parliament is to connect with the citizens of the Union, it must reach out beyond the metropolitan audience.

In my travels from Lapland to Valencia, and from Manchester and Tralee to Longwy, Liège and Graz, I made one important discovery that public opinion in the member states is a lot less hostile to Europe and its directly elected Parliament than some politicians and newspaper proprietors would like to believe.

But public opinion remains ill-informed about the European Union and how it works; and the case for Europe needs to be placed in a modern and relevant context.

The Union has been too successful in banishing the prospect of war between its members for the prospect of renewed conflict to be a spur to public support for further integration.

I concentrated my activities on three main objectives: to make the Parliament better known; to encourage it to focus its activities on the essential; and to make it more effective in carrying out its work.

These aims were complementary. They required organisational initiatives and political choices to be made.

For example, the hearings of the new Commissioners in January 1995 which were one of the political highlights of this legislature required very careful preparation and timing. They also necessitated winning acceptance for a totally new procedure and a broad political consensus as to their scope and how they fitted into the decision the Parliament had to take on the new Commission as a whole.

It turned out to be a success for the Parliament and indeed for the Commission.

It brought the latter closer to the public and aroused intense interest. It underlined the important role the Parliament has in ensuring public accountability of the Commission. It changed the political relationship between Commission and Parliament.

On the key political issues, we have, over the past two and a half years, realigned Parliament's position so that it has become part of the political mainstream.

The key demands we made for the Intergovernmental Conference in two major reports (Martin-Bourlanges/ Dury-Maij-Weggen) as promoted by Elisabeth Guigou and Elmar Brok in the Reflection Group and meetings of the personal representatives, and by myself at ministerial meetings and summits do not satisfy all those on the ultra-federalist outfield.

But they do correspond in large measure to the practical proposals of those, including certain governments, who want substantial but limited progress now.

Our overriding aim is to make the Union more efficient, more open and more democratic.

'More efficient' means enabling the Union to take decisions rapidly, through majority voting on all routine legislation. But for the biggest questions, constitutional changes and future financing, member states would retain their right of veto.

'More democratic' means giving powers to the European Parliament to co-decide on all legislation approved by the Council of Ministers by majority vote. We insist on high democratic standards here and in all the applicant countries; we should apply those standards to ourselves.

'More open' means that the Council, when it makes laws, must do so in public and that our procedures must be simplified and made comprehensible.

The IGC will only make limited reforms. The EU is, and will remain, a Union of member states. All the big decisions will remain in the hands of member states' governments, under the control of national parliaments.

But the reform must be substantial if we are to make this Union work better and if we are to rise to the historic challenge of enlargement.

Because we have been making pragmatic, moderate but significant proposals, we have been listened to; and as the draft Irish treaty outline submitted at Dublin shows, we are making progress.

In practical ways, I have also sought to streamline the Parliament's work: better planning of plenary agendas; holding votes at times when they can be better reported in the press; a new pattern for parliamentary business in Strasbourg and in Brussels; cutting down on the number of trips by committees and delegations; and restructuring the Parliament's administration to enable it to respond better to the new legislative procedures and to improve its information activities.

I also drew up a detailed catalogue of proposals which would put all members' allowances on a sounder and more transparent footing. These proposals will now be looked at by a special working party of personal representatives of the political groups. I hope decisions will be taken in the first six months of this year.

Two and a half years of a presidency cannot be described in terms of a catalogue of political and administrative decisions. It is also a collection of events and moments in the life of an institution and of its 626 politicians from 15 countries and nearly 80 political parties.

This period in office has not been lacking in moments of strong emotion for me and for my colleagues: the close vote on the nomination of Jacques Santer as president of the Commission; the stormy reception given to President Jacques Chirac just after the resumption of nuclear testing by France; the warm welcome for our new colleagues from Sweden, Finland and Austria after enlargement; the tense debate and decision on the customs union with Turkey (where the controversy rolls on); and, perhaps above all, the extraordinary valedictory speech by François Mitterrand (“nationalism means war”) which will live on in the memories of all those who heard it.

But a president has other memories of a more personal nature to cherish, sometimes far removed from the great political events.

For me, these include meeting retired miners at their club in South Wales, talking with the Eskimos in northern Finland about the problems of daily living in the harshest climate in Europe; an audience with the Emperor of Japan; visiting the townships outside Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela's cell on Robben Island; and, most poignantly, being the first German to make a speech to the Knesset in Jerusalem.

Wherever I have gone, whoever I have seen these past few years inside or outside the Union, I have been struck by the growing perception that what Europe and its Parliament does matters; and that the Union itself is becoming the central fact of politics in all our member states.

I am not a recent convert to the European cause. I was a convinced European when I started in politics. But after two and a half fascinating years presiding over Europe's Parliament, my European faith is undiminished.

German Socialist MEP Klaus Hänsch has been president of the European Parliament since July 1994.