Still more questions than answers

Date: 10/10/1996

MORE than a year after EU governments were asked a series of key questions about the Union's future, definitive answers to all but a handful have still to be given.

The lengthy questionnaire was handed out in Messina in June 1995 as the Union celebrated the historic meeting 40 years earlier which had launched it on its way, and prepared for fresh negotiations to shape its future into the 21st century.

It was devised by former Spanish European Affairs Minister Carlos Westendorp, chairman of the Reflection Group which laid the groundwork for the current Intergovernmental Conference, in an attempt to identify the various issues on the table.

Westendorp raised questions on just over 100 individual items, of which 40 dealt with institutional questions alone.

But unlike other examinations, participants have been given not just one but a series of deadlines, discouraging them from giving complete answers before they are forced to do so. It is also different in that many of the answers are not self-contained and depend on responses to other parts of the questionnaire.

Despite these drawbacks, partial responses to some of the questions posed have been given in the six months or so since the IGC negotiations were formally launched in Turin at the end of March.

Any assessment of just how complete those answers are will, however, only be possible when the Irish presidency presents an outline of a possible draft treaty for consideration by EU leaders at their next summit in Dublin in mid-December.

A parallel Franco-German exercise will provide an even clearer illustration of the likely shape of the final answers to Westendorp's original questions.

Paris and Bonn have declared that they intend to present their thoughts on key sections of the revised Maastricht Treaty - particularly on the Common Foreign and Security Policy and justice and home affairs - next month, in a bid to set out the parameters for the final treaty reform.

In a handful of cases, however, the answers - albeit negative - are already clear.

Westendorp's suggestion, for example, that the Union should investigate the issue of the EU's official languages to ensure that the conflicting demands of democracy, efficiency and transparency can be satisfied has met with a deafening silence. No government is prepared to enter that minefield until enlargement makes addressing this sensitive issue unavoidable.

Similarly, little attention is being paid to the suggestion that a hierarchy be established to classify different EU acts and legislation.

Nor, despite British and German efforts, is there much willingness to elaborate the principle of subsidiarity by establishing criteria for its application or by cataloguing separate areas of national and EU juridical competence. The most likely outcome is that the present treaty wording will remain, while declarations from the 1992 Birmingham and Edinburgh summits will be attached to the text as protocols.

On the budgetary front, little support has emerged for streamlining existing procedures by reducing the number of stages through which the annual spending estimates have to go. More significantly, member states have studiously avoided taking up Westendorp's option of using the IGC to examine the whole way the annual budget is financed.

EU governments have also rejected suggestions that the Union be given specific jurisdiction over new policy areas such as civil protection and tourism, arguing that any action could be taken as necessary under the catch-all provisions of Article 235 of the existing treaty.

But in other areas, member states have begun to nibble at the bait cast by Westendorp 15 months ago.

Danish Europe of Nations MEP Jens-Peter Bonde, who has closely followed every twist and turn in the IGC talks, believes considerable progess is being made below the surface.

“I do not agree with people who say nothing is moving. Things are moving in the group, just as they did in Maastricht and in the Single European Act negotiations in 1985. Even the Danes and British, despite their foot-dragging, are moving,” he says.

If anything, the answers which governments are preparing on issues such as crime, immigration, asylum and visa policy are potentially more far-reaching than envisaged in the Westendorp paper.

There is now widespread support for the idea of inserting a specific employment chapter into the treaty, despite the misgivings of a handful of member states. Stronger commitments to sustainable development will be spread through the text to satisfy environmentalists and a pledge of greater openness and transparency will be included.

There is also agreement on the need to reduce to just three the score of EU decision-making procedures involving the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament.

But responses are still awaited to the most important questions of all.

“A lot has already been done, but the big issues will be handled at the end of the day by government leaders. It is not something those below them can settle,” says Bonde.

Institutional questions affecting fundamental issues of national sovereignty - such as less unanimity, changes in the system of weighted voting, and rotating presidencies - are among those which can only be decided by EU political leaders.

Similarly, the degree of policy flexibility which the recast Union should tolerate will only be determined at the eleventh hour, with governments still undecided as to whether eight or ten members should be sufficient for a group to strike out on its own.

The EU has an unenviable reputation for having a voracious appetite for wood pulp, born of its fondness for producing documents by the score. This IGC has made its own, not insignificant, contribution to this ever-growing paper mountain. For it is only when concepts are clearly spelt out on paper that lawyers, diplomats and sundry experts are able to sink their teeth into specific texts and tease out the possible implications of the various elegantly-crafted formulas.

This technique can undoubtedly help in what the Irish presidency likes to describe as “the progressive approximation of texts” - a process designed to lead finally to a mutually acceptable revised treaty.

But the minute attention to detail and careful scrutiny of even the tiniest punctuation mark can divert attention away from the real purpose of the exercise.

It is a danger that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl clearly recognises and, in his own inimitable style, he has found a way to keep the overall objectives in sight.

“The Chancellor knows that tons of documents are produced in the many different ministeries. But he likes to point out that one advantage heads of government enjoy is that they do not read them and so they are free to come to a result,” explains a close aide.

That is perhaps the clearest message to have come out of Dublin last weekend.

The display of political support for the long-running reform negotiations was aimed partly at the wider European electorate, underlining the challenges ahead and the measures needed to face up to them.

But more importantly, it was designed to be listened to and heeded in national capitals, to ensure that individual departments (and not just foreign ministeries) understand what their political leaders believe is at stake.

If the strategy works away from the rarefied atmosphere of a summit, it would reduce the chances of national government departments hamstringing their IGC negotiators.

That tension was recently most graphically illustrated by the refusal of Germany's various federal ministries to go along with the Bonn foreign ministry's plans for more majority voting.

If the message sent out by the summiteers last weekend has the desired impact, then perhaps full answers to the questions posed by Westendorp over a year ago will finally begin to emerge.