Citizens’ champion fights to make their voice heard

Date: 11/04/1996

VIRGILIO Dastoli is planning to make his mark on the closing stages of the Intergovernmental Conference by organising a “march of a million citizens” at next year's Amsterdam summit as part of his campaign for a Europe which is genuinely closer to its citizens.

As secretary-general of the European Movement, created in 1948 and currently presided over by Valéry Giscard D'Estaing, Dastoli has made the closer involvement of ordinary members of the public in European affairs one of his top priorities.

The idea is to mobilise as many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other representatives of the general public as possible, and to channel their voices and influence through a single body - the European Civil Forum.

The forum met in Turin during the launch of the IGC to discuss its plan to stage a massive public demonstration in the streets of Amsterdam at the June 1997 summit. This event is designed to increase the pressure on EU governments to live up to their pledge to bring Europe closer to its citizens as the IGC moves into its decisive phase.

Dastoli explains that from now until June 1997, the forum will “coordinate a growing mobilisation of Europe's public opinion, including environmentalist, social, feminist, human rights, local, regional and other organisations of Europe's citizens who will all take the demonstration in Amsterdam as their focal point”.

The goal of all this activity is to ensure that the mistakes made at the time of the Maastricht negotiations, when little attempt was made to involve the public in the unfolding debate, are not repeated. “The forum wants to ensure that, this time around, the reforms of the Union's institutions are made close to Europe's citizens and in full transparency,” says Dastoli.

He is also highly critical of the low profile given to the European Parliament at the IGC. He firmly believes that the EU's only democratically-elected institution should have the right to approve the outcome of the negotiations before the final draft of the reformed treaty is submitted to national parliaments in member states for ratification.

Dastoli recalls that in the run-up to Maastricht, through the so-called Parallel Interinstitutional Conferences (PICs), the Parliament was allowed to send 12 MEPs to the negotiations to represent the opinions of all of its political groups.

“Sadly, during those negotiations, the Parliament failed to avail itself of this instrument because it failed to agree on a clear political project to champion. Instead, MEPs submitted a series of amendments to the amendments to the treaty and lost themselves in the detail. This time round, the PICs are no longer there and the Parliament has to make do with two observers who do not even directly participate in the concrete work of the IGC,” he says.

A seasoned member of the Parliament's staff, Dastoli has been committed to the European cause since his university days in the late Sixties, when he met Altiero Spinelli, a convinced federalist and one of the founding fathers of the European Communities, who later went on to become a Commissioner. The meeting had a profound impact on the young student. “I was struck by Spinelli's personality and idealism. Meeting him made me realise that Europe was my future,” he says.

“Spinelli was not only an idealist. As a Commissioner, he knew how to use the Community mechanism to make concrete policies a reality. It was Spinelli who forged the Community's industrial, cultural and R&D policies. People tend to forget this,” says Dastoli.

When, in 1976, Spinelli resigned from the Commission to stand in an Italian general election as an independent candidate on the Communist ticket, he asked Dastoli to join him.

As leader of the parliamentary group of the Independent Left, Spinelli appointed Dastoli as his chief of cabinet in Rome from 1976 to 1979. And when, in 1979, Spinelli became an MEP, Dastoli went with him to Strasbourg.

From then until his mentor's death in 1986, Dastoli was Spinelli's right-hand man in Strasbourg and Brussels.

“Together, we fought many battles, beginning with the EC's 1980 budget,” he recollects, painting a vivid picture of the first time the Parliament wielded its budgetary powers in a fight with the Council of Ministers which prompted the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to utter her famous battle-cry: “I want my money back!”

The amended budget, submitted six months later, was even worse and on 21 May 1980, Spinelli addressed MEPs, warning that the Community was in a “state of paralysis”, declaring that the member states were not capable of breaking the impasse and insisting it was up to the Parliament to come up with a proposal for reforms.

“This idea lead to the creation of the 'Crocodile Club', named after the Strasbourg restaurant where we met, and the subsequent establishment of the committee on institutional affairs,” says Dastoli. “Until then, the treaties were considered as untouchable. The 'Spinelli Project' had the merit of asserting the idea that the EEC treaties could be modified. In other words, the Single European Act and all the following reforms of the EEC treaties would not have been possible without Spinelli.”

Since Spinelli's death, Dastoli has continued to champion his mentor's ideals and methods. With Emmanuele Gazzo, Emile Noel, Carlo Ripa di Meana and others, he founded the “Action Committee Altiero Spinelli”, whose main objective was to foster public debate on European affairs.

Within the Parliament, Dastoli relaunched the Crocodile Club initiative, creating the 'Federalist Intergroup'.

“This was active during the 1986-89 legislature, but lost steam once the IGC on Maastricht was convened, as the Parliament was marginalised during those negotiations,” he says ruefully.

After that, Dastoli moved from one post to another within the Parliament, from the committee on institutional affairs to the committee on the Delors Package. He then worked for the Italian Communist group in Strasbourg, but left after it linked up with the European Socialists (PSE) because of his concern over the deep divisions within the group on federalist issues.

He then joined the Parliament's administration and has, since December 1994, been a member of the secretariat of the committee on culture, youth, education and the media.

On a political level, Dastoli continues to wage his federalist battle. Last April, he was elected secretary-general of the European Movement, whose objective is to work for ever deeper integration.

Dastoli has two main criticisms of last month's Turin summit which formally launched the IGC process.

He reproaches EU leaders for agreeing a negotiating mandate which he describes as “so vague that it bears little difference to John Major's White Paper on A Partnership of Nations”, saying: “It leaves open the possibility for any type of interpretation.”

But his greatest concern is the limited role which MEPs have been given in the whole process - although he believes that the battle to give the Parliament a greater say in the outcome of the IGC is not over.

“I think some governments could still be convinced to state that they will accept the reforms of the treaties provided that they are approved by the Parliament first. Should any one of the member states commit itself to submitting the draft texts for approval to the Parliament before initialling them, this would give a considerably more significant role to the latter than agreed in Turin. This would mean that the IGC would have to take the views of the Parliament into full account throughout the negotiations,” he says.

Dastoli is cautiously hopeful that a stand by Germany could do the trick.

“Chancellor Kohl could make a commitment with himself to do so as he knows that he will still be in power in 1997,” he argues.

“Moreover,” Dastoli points out, “the German government is bound by a judgement of the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to seek more democratic control as it gradually gives up its sovereign powers in favour of the Union. The Parliament is best placed to assure this democratic control.”