Confidence born of experience

Date: 21/11/1996

FOR a key member of the small group of politicians and diplomats charting the EU's future in the current Intergovernmental Conference, Denmark's representative Niels Ersbøll is remarkably frank.

He is personally not convinced the exercise is necessarily a good way to do business and fears that governments are not facing up to some of the key issues which must be addressed if enlargement is to be a success.

“It does not suit my temperament to have this introspection. I think that what average Europeans are looking for are indications that their governments are capable of dealing with the problems. Too much introspection always tends to be a pale reflection of reality,” he explains.

Ersbøll himself openly acknowledges that the Union is not dealing at all well with many of the difficult issues it now faces, ranging from unemployment to recent events in Zaïre. “That is not a judgement, but a statement of the obvious,” he insists.

And despite the attention being given to the range of items on the IGC agenda, he makes it clear that governments should not lose sight of their central challenge.

“What is important for the Union today is that it begins to function well again. It functioned well for quite a long time, but of course that period of its success was marked by political stability. Now we are in a sort of no-man's-land in the sense that no one knows exactly what the Europe of tomorrow will be. We only know one thing, which is that if Europe does not function, then the answers to the problems of today and tomorrow will be that much further away,” he warns.

But Ersbøll, who has been at the centre of EU activities ever since he helped negotiate Denmark's entry into the then European Economic Community in 1973 and became its first Union ambassador, is also a realist.

“We agreed to do it [the IGC] and it is part of the method of European integration that if you set an objective or a timetable, then you have to respect it. There is a sort of mysticism in that,” he adds.

With a confidence born of experience of seeing the Union operate from close quarters for decades, the 70-year-old Ersbøll has no doubt that the end-of-June deadline set for completion of the IGC will be met.

But he fears some key issues may be left on the sidelines.

“How is the Council of Ministers with 27 or even 20 member states actually to function? That is not a question which will go away if we have majority voting everywhere or widespread co-decision with the European Parliament or better committee procedures when the Commission acts as the executive,” he maintains.

After serving as the Council's secretary-general for 14 years before retiring in 1994, Ersbøll admits that he would relish the challenge of taking up the post again in such hypothetical circumstances.

But he insists that an essential precondition has to be met if an enlarged Union is to operate effectively.

“There is only one answer to the problems to make such an assembly function - and with those numbers the Council of Ministers would be an assembly - and that is to have a strong presidency. The presidency would need an appropriate sort of administration, not a national but an international one,” he explains.

ThIS theme is one that is dear to Ersbøll's heart. During his lengthy spell as secretary-general, he gradually raised the status and importance of the Council secretariat so that it is now a key player in helping presidencies carry out their tasks.

He himself has described the transformation as taking the secretariat from the role of notaire to one where it offers policy advice, prepares compromise proposals and generally ensures that decisions are taken.

Ersbøll himself has been described by past presidents variously as their “nanny”, “right-hand man” and “father confessor” as he has guided them through their spell at the EU helm. He himself explains the working partnership somewhat differently.

“I basically see the relationship between the Council president and the secretary-general as the same as that between a national minister and his closest collaborator, so that there is absolute confidence and a clear respect for the two roles of political representative and adviser. I never had instances where it did not work,” he says.

He is convinced that further enlargement of the Union will make it even more necessary for the Council to have a committed secretariat under a strong secretary-general. But he openly fears that member states have not yet drawn this logical conclusion.

“I feel it is a safe bet that we are not going to come up with the natural answer to the question except after a long and painful period of hit and miss when we are forced into doing things we ought to be planning for. Why? Because governments are notoriously conservative and only very reluctantly face up to change which is imposed by events,” he maintains.

Ersbøll speaks as a veteran of two earlier IGCs. Each led to a new treaty - the Single European Act and Maastricht - and both differed from the current exercise.

“The Single Act was a response to a clear need to complete the Treaty of Rome as regards its main objective of creating an internal market. That was, in a way, a simple task. Maastricht began in a similar way with work on creating an economic and monetary union and then the need for political union arose as a response to the political change in Europe,” he points out.

“This conference is procedural in nature. It was decided during Maastricht to revert to some of the issues we did not agree on at the time and to look at how the new provisions were working. This is a treaty revision conference.”

But Ersbøll insists that despite the flow of information percolating fairly freely from the group on the progress of the negotiations, the significance of some of the decisions to be taken is not fully understood, nor is it entirely clear where the talks are headed.

He seizes on the example of majority voting to illustrate how he believes it “is quite misleading to suggest there will be major changes” in the way decisions are taken.

“We need more majority voting. But for people to understand this, they will have to understand that we already have qualified majority voting for most things - at least in the European Community part of the treaty - and that there are a few things where unanimous decisions are the rule today and will continue to be the rule tomorrow. So we are left with the area in-between which is fairly small and will not make the big difference,” he explains.

He is equally explicit in insisting that the negotiations have not reached the point where “governments know what they want and why”. This apparent lack of clarity may be for tactical reasons or because of a genuine uncertainty about the route ahead. But it may also lie in the fact that the future of the Union is bound up in more than the IGC.

As far as the former Council secretary-general is concerned, the fundamental question which must now be answered is whether the Union has reached the point where the breadth and depth of EU cooperation is about right or needs to be further developed.

“This is the big question to which people give different answers. The outcome depends not so much on the IGC, but on other items on the agenda such as future financing, reform of expensive policies and how we cope with all the problems of enlargement,” explains Ersbøll.

From a personal point of view, he makes clear that he believes that the Union has virtually reached that level of desirable integration. Almost all the elements - or at least their objectives - are already on the table. Once defence is added to the existing ingredients, he believes the basic package will be complete.