Battle lines drawn ahead of IGC talks

Date: 10/02/2000

As EU governments prepare for the launch of a new round of EU treaty talks next week, Gareth Harding examines the issues at stake and assesses the likely outcome of the year-long talks

TALKS aimed at reforming the EU's treaty to prepare for enlargement to the east kick off in Brussels next week, but few people appear to have noticed and even less seem to care.

Given the dull institutional topics on the agenda for the year-long Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), it should perhaps come as little surprise that Europe's citizens are not on tenterhooks. After all, it is difficult to get too excited about the extension of qualified majority voting (QMV) in the Council of Ministers unless you get a kick out of reciting articles from the Union's treaty.

Having spent the last year talking about what to talk about at the IGC, some EU leaders are only too aware of the risks of further alienating a public which already feels distanced from Brussels. Hence Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres' heart-felt plea for the agenda to be broadened to include "themes with a more direct human connection, so that we are not restricted to the dry institutional topics of reforming the various European bodies".

The Portuguese presidency wants the negotiations to tackle issues such as defence and security, a European charter of fundamental rights and ways of enabling groups of member states to go it alone on certain contentious topics - the so-called 'flexibility clause'.

The European Commission and European Parliament, Italy, Greece, Austria and the Benelux states also favour deep-seated reforms of the Union treaty before the EU takes in the dozen or so central and eastern European countries queuing up to join the bloc.

But a powerful group of member states which includes the UK, France, Germany, Spain and the Nordic countries would prefer to focus on the three major issues left over from the Amsterdam Treaty talks; namely, the reweighting of votes in the Council; limiting the number of European Commissioners in an enlarged Union; and extending QMV.

They argue that many of the other reforms which are needed can be introduced without any change to the treaty, and say reaching agreement on the three Amsterdam leftovers alone would lead to a major shake-up in the way the EU conducts its business.

If past IGCs are anything to go by, the agenda is almost sure to be broadened as the talks drag on. Indeed, there are already signs that member states' resistance to this is cracking.

At their December summit in Helsinki, Union leaders agreed to focus on the three Amsterdam leftovers, but also left the door open to "any other necessary amendments to the treaties as regards the European institutions".

There is an almost unanimous agreement among member states that reforms are needed in the European Parliament, Court of Auditors and Court of Justice. Many also believe it will be difficult to avoid talking about defence and an EU 'bill of rights' in the latter half of the year.

"Even countries which are against sorting these issues out at this IGC, do not mind them being raised," Portugal's Secretary of State for Europe Seixas da Costa told European Voice after his tour of Europe's capitals.

However, most governments are firmly opposed to the Commission's proposal to divide the treaty into two parts to make it easier to amend parts of the EU rulebook and they are split down the middle over the use of the flexibility mechanism.

More federalist states such as France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands believe that allowing groups of countries to go it alone will strengthen the Union, while the UK, Spain, Ireland and the Nordic countries think it will make the bloc more difficult to manage.

Looking at each of the three leftovers individually, it is difficult to see why a deal should be so hard to clinch by the end-of-year deadline.

EU leaders came tantalisingly close to reaching an agreement on the most controversial issues in 1997. In the end, they attached a protocol to the treaty which stated that by the time the first new members were admitted to the Union, "the Commission shall comprise one national of each of the member states, provided that by that date, the weighting of the votes in the Council has been accepted".

The EU's largest member states appear willing to give up the privilege of sending more than one Commissioner to Brussels in return for a reweighting of votes in their favour in the Council. However, given the number of countries waiting to join the Union, the college of Commissioners would still swell in size if each member state only sent one representative to the self-styled capital of Europe.

To get around this problem, IGC Commissioner Michel Barnier has suggested freezing the number of top officials at 20. But it is highly unlikely that any countries will sign up to this approach, as it would mean some losing the right to a representative in Brussels altogether as soon as more than five new countries join.

The present system of allocating votes in the Council is also in urgent need of revision if the EU wants to better represent its citizens. Germany, for example has a population of more than 80 million, but only ten votes in the Council; while Luxembourg, which has just over 400,000 citizens, has one-fifth of the votes of its giant eastern neighbour.

Although this imbalance in favour of smaller member states will increase with enlargement, no one is arguing that votes should be handed out strictly according to population.

Not even Germany, which has almost 25 million more people than the UK and France, believes that it will end up with more votes in the Council than its two biggest Union partners at the end of the IGC.

Instead, the number of votes each country gets is likely to rise across the board so that the increase in larger member states' voting power is less pronounced. This was the formula proposed at Amsterdam and only failed because Belgium objected to the Netherlands having two extra votes to reflect the fact that it was home to five million more people.

To prevent member states getting bogged down in the numbers game, the Commission has proposed that decisions be taken by a 'double simple majority'. Under this system, agreement could only be reached if a majority of EU governments actually represented a majority of the Union's total population.

Member states believe the Commission's idea could fly if a reweighting of national votes proves impossible, but one diplomat pointed out that the "jiggling of numbers is one of those questions that you leave until the last night".

At Amsterdam, Belgium, France and Italy signed a declaration calling for a "significant extension" of majority voting. Since then, the UK and Germany have come round to the view that giving countries the right to veto draft laws in a wide range of areas in a Union of almost 30 states would be a recipe for disaster.

The Commission believes that unanimous voting should only be reserved for a handful of legislative areas and that QMV should become the norm in the Council. Most member states appear to agree, although a handful will fight to maintain their vetoes for most defence, taxation, constitutional and justice issues.

Guterres has said that "if everyone approaches the reforms with Europe's benefit in mind, the reforms will be possible". But he warned: "If everyone seeks to gain more clout at others' expense, then naturally no reforms will be possible."

The fact that enlargement is now looming much closer on the horizon than it was when the Amsterdam negotiations took place three years ago should make it easier to reach an agreement this time round and France, which will hold the EU presidency in the second half of the year, will push hard for a new treaty to be rubber-stamped at Nice in December.

But no one should underestimate the ability of member states to hold out obstinately for their interests. "In every IGC, it is a question of national pride - no one wants to have less than before," said one official.

Major feature. As EU governments prepare for the launch of a new round of EU treaty talks, article examines the issues at stake and assesses the likely outcome of the year-long talks.