‘Ecological crises await unless we plunder treaty’

By Emily Smith

Date: 04/05/06

Looming ecological crises mean Europe urgently needs key powers conferred by the stalled EU constitution to avoid a bleak environmental future, according to a confidential European Commission document.

A note from the Director General for Environment Peter Carl to Secretary General Catherine Day argues the case for cherry-picking ideas from the constitution, which was rejected in referenda in France and the Netherlands last year.

"Centrifugal forces" threaten Europe, the document says, and the means to hold the EU together in face of environmental emergencies "will crucially depend on whether or not the constitution's main provisions (extension of majority voting, easier use of enhanced co-operation, stronger international voice) will have been adopted".

The Commission said last week that the Union may not be ready to deal with the rejection of the constitution before 2008.

But the environment document warns that regulations from Brussels will become increasingly "unpractical" with 27 or 28 member states unless majority rule is extended. The Commission said that the existing Nice Treaty was enough to hold the EU together if Romania and Bulgaria joined the Union as planned next year.

Clashes are predicted by the environment department document between member states who "want a pause in environmental efforts" and those who "favour an ambitious environmental agenda".

Carl would therefore have welcomed the constitution's provisions making it easier for smaller groups of member states to pursue their integration in a specific area, independent of the others.

The document sees this enhanced co-operation mechanism as a means "to promote environmental tax reform", which would otherwise require unanimity among member states. Moves to any kind of EU tax competences are bitterly opposed by several members, in particular the UK.

Enhanced co-operation is unpopular with many governments, who fear that it could lead to a two-speed EU.

Day is expected to base recommendations to Commission President José Manuel Barroso on this document and similar papers from the other director-generals.

One official said the environment document's ideas on the constitution were so politically sensitive they were unlikely to make it into any formal advice.

German Socialist MEP Jo Leinen, head of the European Parliament's constitutional affairs committee, said Carl's comments on the importance of the constitution were "a good observation in the field of environment".

Carl's paper also suggests that the EU foreign minister envisaged by the constitution would give Europe a "stronger international voice".

Leinen said this minister would "not only work in the traditional foreign policy issues. Environment policy is part of external policy, the minister would presumably join big UN environment conferences".

He added that EU energy policy would also benefit from adoption of the constitution. "The EU currently has no competence here; the constitution would change that."

The paper says the "central element of the European project for the ten years ahead" should be the "triangle" of the environment, energy and competitiveness.

It claims that if the EU did not manage properly climate change it would have failed "diplomatically... economically... [and] politically".

A spokesman for Barroso said the document was simply "a personal contribution to ongoing reflections on the future of Europe".

"The Commission has never said it does not see the case for institutional improvements," the spokesman added.

Author quotes from a confidential note from the European Commission's Director General for Environment, Peter Carl, to Commission Secretary General Catherine Day in which he argued the case for cherry-picking ideas from the Constitutional Treaty, which had been rejected in referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005. According to the document looming ecological crises meant that the European Union urgently needed key powers conferred by the stalled EU constitution to avoid a bleak environmental future. Such powers would involve the extension of majority voting, easier use of enhanced co-operation and a stronger international voice for the EU.