Tripartite meeting to extend IGC debate

Date: 09/05/1996

By Rory Watson

THE Italian government will host a special tripartite meeting of EU institutions early next month as part of a strategy to widen the debate on the future of the Maastricht Treaty.

The gathering, requested by European Parliament President Klaus Hänsch, will take place just two weeks before Union leaders assess the opening stages of the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations at their European summit in Florence.

“The discussions will range over the whole IGC ground,” said one senior parliamentary official this week, adding: “The interinstitutional meeting is part of a mosaic we are constructing. We are trying to put different things together and hope the picture will be complete by the end.”

The meeting - tentatively scheduled for 6 June - follows the formula first used during the original Maastricht negotiations of bringing together an equal number of ministers and MEPs, with additional Commission involvement, to monitor progress at the IGC. But the similarities end there as the Union canters around the constitutional course for the second time in five years.

“The regular interinstitutional meetings were the only direct contacts we had with the negotiators of Maastricht. So they were a useful way of being briefed. But they were very formal occasions and frustration would build up at the monologues,” recalls one parliamentary source.

This time around, contacts between the institutions are far more extensive and business-like, although French and British opposition prevented MEPs from having an observer's seat at the IGC negotiating table.

The Parliament's two representatives - French Socialist Elisabeth Guigou and German Christian Democrat Elmar Brok - have monthly sessions with all the IGC negotiators. Each can last up to four hours and the practice has grown up of inviting them to working lunches or dinner as well.

Under a parallel arrangement, Hänsch meets foreign ministers once a month. “We had a very lively debate. There was a lot of give and take,” said IGC group chairman Silvio Fagiolo after the Parliament president's first meeting with ministers last month.

The Italian presidency has also ensured that the Parliament is given copies of all the papers being used as a basis for the IGC negotiations and its observers are carefully briefed by Fagiolo on the outcome of each meeting.

“I try to give them careful details, although I do not reveal individual member state positions and we participate with them on each major issue of the IGC agenda,” explained Fagiolo.

Next month's meeting will ensure that a wider range of MEPs will be involved in the IGC negotiating process, with representatives from almost all the political groups attending.

The Parliament hopes that the formula will be used twice in every six-month EU presidency and has already raised the subject informally with the Irish, who take over from the Italians on 1 July.

But MEPs are also using a variety of other methods to get their message across to the IGC negotiators. Liberal group leader Gijs de Vries described next month's meeting as “one of a variety of arrows we have in the parliamentary quiver” and, like many others, he believes that the dialogue between Euro MPs and governments is working quite well.

But he stresses: “It is important that MEPs do not restrict themselves to formal channels of communication. My priority at this stage is to inform and consult national parliamentary groups. It is important that efforts are made to sensitise, inform and consult national

MPs, as they are our natural allies. We need each other.”

Others have suggested that Hänsch may emulate one of his predecessors as president, Enrique Barón Crespo, and make a tour of national capitals later in the year.

In 1991, it was this series of meetings with EU prime ministers which paved the way for acceptance of the Parliament's view that Commissioners should serve for five years to coincide with parliamentary terms of office and be formally endorsed by Euro MPs.