Crisis ignites debate on treaty reform

Date: 25/03/1999

By Tim Jones

" THIS is like a bomb which has exploded in our midst." This remark from Peter Ludlow, director of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), underlines the impact which last week's decision by the 20-strong European Commission to resign had on the EU's policymakers and those who seek to influence their work.

Ever since the Finns announced last summer that they were planning to hold preparatory talks on a new Union treaty revision conference during their six-month presidency of the EU beginning in July, think-tanks have been refining their proposals for urgently needed institutional reform.

But the decision of 18 Commissioners to commit 'collegiate' suicide last week to force Jacques Santer and Edith Cresson into doing the same has given fresh impetus to their work. "Maybe it is what was needed to open up the question of the collegiality of the Commission," says Ludlow.

Andrew Duff, outgoing director of the Federal Trust in London, agrees that the issue has now moved up the agenda. "The crisis has certainly strengthened the argument for a properly portfolio-structured Commission to give them a semblance of ministerial responsibility for their departments," he says.

Finland is aiming to secure the agreement of other member states to limit the next intergovernmental conference on EU treaty reform to three issues which could not be resolved by Union leaders at their Amsterdam summit in June 1997.

These are ending the practice of allowing every member state to nominate at least one Commissioner; extending qualified majority voting (QMV) to policies which now require unanimity; and recalculating countries' voting powers to take better account of the size of their populations.

So far, the most ambitious work on institutional reform has been carried out under the auspices of the Brussels-based European Policy Centre, which has established four working groups to examine key areas of EU policy.

The four groups are focusing on fighting poverty with the help of business, Europe's role in the world, enlarging the Union to the east and democracy and decision-making, and will report to a conference as the Portuguese presidency of the EU kicks off in January. The last group is chaired by former Belgian ambassador to the EU, Philippe de Schoutheete.

" We decided to structure our work, with a single rapporteur and a junior rapporteur, so that everything could be brought together in January," said the EPC's Stanley Crossick. "It reflects the fact that so many of these issues inter-relate and can feed into each other."

The EPC is proposing five institutional reforms for the IGC. Firstly, it argues that unanimity should either be abolished completely or, if not, that EU summits and the Council of Ministers should have the right to decide unanimously to change the voting procedures in particular areas to QMV.

There could be different voting thresholds to safeguard national interests; by, for example, laying down that tax changes could only be approved by votes representing 80% of the Union's population.

The EPC also argues that QMV should be replaced by votes representing a straight majority of the EU population, the Commission should be reduced in size, justice and home affairs policy should be gradually brought fully into the Union's decision-making processes, and the same should be done with foreign but not defence policy.

However, several of the think-tanks which focus on EU issues are sceptical that Union leaders will agree to make the Commission smaller, despite threats from French President Jacques Chirac that failure to settle this issue could delay the process of enlarging the Union into central and eastern Europe.

" I think the small member states essentially won in 1996-97. The principle that there must be one Commissioner per member state is basically non-negotiable," says CEPS' Ludlow. "Given linguistic diversity and national identity, it is seen as indispensable that both big and small states feel they have their man or woman in Brussels, even if they are legally independent."

He considers the pre-Amsterdam French plan to appoint senior and junior Commissioners, each with responsibility for specific portfolios, as a way around this problem. "In this way, the notion of individual responsibility would be written into the work of the Commission and colleagues who are letting the side down would be identified," he says.

Wolfgang Wessels, professor of European political science at Cologne University and chairman of the Trans-European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) think-tank network, is concerned that governments could make over-hasty decisions on the basis of the crisis sparked by the Commission's resignation.

" We should be very careful about the way we react to recent events," he says. "There is a danger of overshooting, as the monetary people say, and collegiality has its advantages. What happened at the Commission was less a structural than an attitudinal problem and the trauma itself will have a lasting effect on the behaviour of the next Commissioners."

Nevertheless, CEPS would like to see a minor reform introduced to make Commissioners' sackable without recourse to the European Court of Justice. It argues that since they are nominated by member states, the president of the Commission should be able to request the dismissal of an incompetent or corrupt Commissioner in consultation with the government which nominated him and with the European Parliament.

Most think-tanks are expecting the next IGC to be a 'minimalist' one, focusing on a limited number of issues.

In a formal submission to a British parliamentary inquiry into EU enlargement, Duff made it clear that he is expecting an IGC 'extra-lite', with even plans to cut back the size of the Commission or re-weight voting powers seen as unnecessarily ambitious.

" There is no known instance of smaller states ganging up in the Council to out-vote the larger, and it is difficult to foresee how or why such a coalition could be formed in the future after enlargement - especially if Poland, like Spain, is counted as a larger member state," he said.

Duff's belief that the mini-IGC which is likely to begin during the Portuguese presidency should refine EU institutions rather than reinvent the wheel is not shared by Alvaro Vasconcelos, director of the Lisbon-based Institute of International Strategic Studies.

" What I would like to see in this IGC is a real addressing of the democratic deficit," says Vasconcelos. "The real democratic problem in the EU is not with the Commission but in the Council. It is not transparent and, while it acts as a legislative body, it is not a parliament."

Wessels, who is drafting a paper on the institutional consequences of enlargement for a conference at the European University Institute in June, sympathises with the view that an 'IGC-lite' could be a mistake. This is not based on hopes or beliefs but rather on very practical concerns.

" The obvious problem with only dealing with the Amsterdam leftovers is that dealing with these three issues only may well be insufficient for enlargement," he says.

This does not mean that questions of defence and security policy or a mass extension of QMV ought to be dragged into the negotiations. Instead, he says, Title VII of the Amsterdam Treaty - Provisions on Closer Cooperation - may need to be beefed up to allow more federally minded member states to intensify policy links if some of the other 20-30 members of the EU refuse to give their consent to more integration.

The ultimate aim, says Ludlow, is to make IGCs a routine three-to-five-year practice. "If we could de-dramatise IGCs, it would be a very splendid thing," he says.

Major feature which looks at current proposals of the multitude of European think-tanks for EU institutional reform.