Fresh attack on French handling of IGC talks

Date: 26/10/00

By Simon Taylor

FRANCE is under renewed attack from Union diplomats over its handling of the Intergovernmental Conference talks, amid concern over its decision not to narrow the options on key reform issues in a draft treaty due to be published next week.

EU officials say the text due to be presented to negotiators at a meeting on

4-5 November will not stipulate how many European Commissioners there should be when the Union expands. The French presidency has been calling for the number to be capped at 20 after enlargement to ensure the institution does not become unmanageable. But it has decided not to table this proposal next week, although officials say they expect the paper to suggest ways of strengthening the Commission president's power and fixing the number of vice-presidents.

The draft treaty is also unlikely to contain a specific proposal for bringing member states' share of the votes in the Council of Ministers more into line with their population size.

EU diplomats are warning that France's decision not to table concrete proposals on either issue, with just six weeks to go before Union leaders are due to conclude a deal on treaty reform at their December summit, risks producing a messy deal on the reweighting of votes in Nice, because of a lack of essential groundwork on highly technical issues. "The models have been on the table for five years. It is time we started dealing with the nitty-gritty," said one.

Diplomats compared Paris' strategy to the Dutch approach to the final negotiations on the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, which failed to produce an agreement on rebalancing votes between small and large member states because of a lack of preparation. "France is leaving two big issues to the last minute and is risking even bigger problems than the Dutch faced in the run-up to the Amsterdam Treaty," said one.

Negotiators have examined a range of options for linking countries' population size to voting rights more closely. An Italian plan to increase the range of votes, giving the smallest member states three and the largest, Germany, 33, has attracted widespread support.

Finding the right formula for sharing out power in the Council is seen as essential for the next enlargement, which could see two countries with populations of less than a million - Malta and Cyprus - joining the Union.

Officials from smaller member states, which attacked France last month for allegedly putting the interests of their bigger neighbours first, claim Paris' approach stems from its desire to coerce them into a deal which would reduce their influence within EU institutions. "It is quite clear they are putting pressure on the smaller countries. If they admitted at this stage that we will end up with one Commissioner per member state, they would not be able to force them into make concessions on the sharing out of votes," said one.

French diplomats said that the paper to be published next week should not be seen as a draft treaty but as a "synthesis of documents" discussed so far. "It is a bit premature to have distinct ideas of the size of the Commission and the reweighting of votes because member states have not clearly committed themselves on these issues, despite what happened at Biarritz," said one.