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Summary:
The agreement on the EU budget for 2007-13, reached by the European Council on Saturday, December 17, may be assessed from two standpoints: its necessity and its value. Coming on the heels of the fiasco of the constitutional referendums in France and Holland in May and June, and the European Council’s failure in June to reach a budgetary agreement, the December agreement was essential. The mere existence of an agreement is the best possible news for the Union. However, our contentment should not blind us to the fact that this is an especially ungenerous agreement in terms of the needs of the Union and, above all, the needs of its new members. Therefore, although the agreement may close one of the EU’s many open fronts and thus help break the deadlock in the process of ratifying the European Constitution, these negotiations clearly show that the method used up to now to negotiate the budgets no longer works in the interests of the Union as a whole. This paper concludes that we must use the available time ahead of us to lay the groundwork for a new budget-making process that properly represents the interests of the European Union as a whole when the European Council conducts its negotiations behind closed doors.
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