Clouds clear in Klosterneuburg

Date: 01/06/06

EU governments took the first tentative steps this weekend to end their self-enforced period of indecision and inaction introduced after the rejection of the Union's proposed constitution.

After nearly a year of the unconvincing "period of reflection" imposed in the wake of the emphatic 'No' from French and Dutch voters, foreign ministers meeting outside Vienna broadly agreed a series of steps for getting institutional reforms in place in or around 2009.

While nearly all of the 27 ministers agreed it was too early to declare the period of reflection over, Austria's Ursula Plassnik announced that the thinking phase should develop into a new phase of dialogue. She said that the "thunderstorms" of last year over the constitution had cleared, adding that only the 25 member states acting together could find a "final solution".

At their summit meeting in two weeks' time, EU leaders will only agree to a twin-track approach of continuing to reflect on the future of Europe while carrying on with "business as usual" and delivering results for citizens.

What the informal meeting in the 12th-century Klosterneuburg abbey achieved was a broad consensus for a plan under which Germany, at the end of its presidency in June 2007, draws up a roadmap or timetable for the steps towards the 2009 deadline. Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that Berlin would come up with a "solid proposal" next June. He also hinted strongly that Germany was prepared to give up its longstanding position of resisting any renegotiation of the constitution. "We have to respect [our French and Dutch colleagues] who say that there is no prospect of presenting the constitution again in those countries," Steinmeier told his colleagues, distancing himself from Val� Giscard d'Estaing, the chairman of the convention which drafted the constitution, who recently called for a second vote on the text in France and the Netherlands.

While Germany and several other countries insist on maintaining as much of the current constitution text as possible, it is widely accepted that the draft will have to be renegotiated, although this is not formally admitted at this stage.

Germany's room for manoeuvre will be limited given that France will not have a new government in place by the end of the German presidency following presidential elections in May and parliamentary votes a month later.

But there was broad consensus at the meeting that 2009 was a good target for implementing new treaty changes. Plassnik pointed out that there were a number of events in the EU calendar for which "legal clarity" was needed. These included the European Parliament elections and the make-up of the new European Commission. Under the Nice treaty, once the number of member states has risen to 27 (which will happen if Romania and Bulgaria join as expected in January 2007) EU leaders have to agree to reducing the size of the next Commission to fewer than 27 using a system of rotation.

But several EU officials admitted that although 2009 was a sensible target for adopting new reforms, the timing was very tight.

The earliest date that initial discussions for new negotiations could start would be under the Portuguese presidency in the second half of 2007. These negotiations could take up to six months or a year depending on how far they went in dismantling the existing constitutional text. One aspect of the draft which could disappear is the name "constitution" itself.

Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said in his acceptance speech for the Charlemagne prize last week that "it might have been better to have called [the constitution] a basic law". Germany's Steinmeier indicated that Berlin might be able to drop the name "constitution", provided that the contents of the new treaty were very similar to the text signed by EU leaders in Rome 2004. "The term [constitution] is not the most important aspect for me; in Germany we have had a basic law for more than 50 years and we have got on fine." Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn talked in Klosterneuburg about agreeing a "basic treaty".

Plassnik said the issue of the name had not been discussed at the meeting and stressed the importance of the content of any new institutional deal.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister and a presidential hopeful, had suggested a "stripped down" treaty containing only the main institutional innovations of the constitution such as a European foreign minister and a permanent president of the European Council. But focusing only on institutional issues would alienate countries such as Germany and Spain that insist on a text that stresses the EU's common values. It would also lose the constitution's advantages of consolidating existing treaty rules in a single document.

Officials are warning that the more an emerging new treaty departs from the constitution text, the harder it will be to get agreement among member states. Only last week the difficult issue of a reference to the Europe's Christian roots in the constitution re-surfaced after German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed support for the idea.

After the renegotiation, there would have to be a new ratification period which would again take around 18 months, making 2009 more of an aspiration than a fixed deadline. As Plassnik put it, her job was only arranging the "choreography" for the steps ahead.

Major analysis feature on the outcome of the informal meeting of EU Foreign Ministers at Klosterneuburg Abbey (Austria), on 27-28 May 2006. Ministers discussed how to proceed towards a constitutional settlement for the EU one year after ratification of the Constitutional Treaty had been suspended for a period of reflection. It was expected that Germany, holder of the EU Presidency in the first half of 2007, would play an important role in the resumption of the discussions.