EU seeks new balance of power

Date: 30/01/1997

BY ONE of the European Union's periodical quirks of fate, the three countries most heavily involved in steering through the reforms of its institutional structure currently under discussion are among its smallest members: Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Their spells in the EU presidency chair are coinciding with pressure for the Union to perform serious surgery - and not just a cosmetic face-lift - on its decision-making procedures if it is to adapt successfully to the challenge of taking in new members.

After Ireland successfully tabled a draft text last month setting out potential answers to the key questions facing the Union, the Dutch have now entered the political minefield of institutional reform, while the Luxembourgers (who take over the rotating presidency in July) are waiting in the wings ready to complete the negotiations if the June deadline is missed.

These institutional issues go to the heart of the relationship between the Union's larger and smaller members, a relationship which came under the spotlight again last week as Dutch politicians and journalists accused the French and Germans of trying to steal their country's presidential limelight by holding a joint ministerial press conference in Brussels to outline a common strategy.

Most of the key questions centre on the work of the Council of Ministers. They involve the practice of rotating the EU presidency between member states every six months, reweighting the votes which governments wield when adopting legislation by majority vote and, possibly, introducing a separate population hurdle which must be crossed before decisions are taken.

But they also affect other EU institutions. Should every member state have the right to a European Commissioner and to a member of the European Court of Justice? Given the support emerging for an absolute limit of 700 MEPs, how should national representations be balanced so that all voters are adequately represented in the European Parliament?

Experience in the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations so far reveals that, in one way, the division between the Union's big five members (Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain) and the rest is a false one.

Policy differences owe more to economic, ideological and geographical factors than to questions of pure size.

“On no single policy issue do you find big member states on one side and the small ones on the other,” confirms one official heavily involved in the talks.

But on some policy matters, there is no doubt that the behaviour of all - or at least some - of the larger member states rankles. This is particularly true in the area of a common foreign and security policy (CFSP) where efforts to forge a unified EU approach towards the former Yugoslavia have frequently run up against separate procedures involving France, Germany and the UK in cooperation with the United States and Russia.

Similarly, Greece does not take kindly to the practice of the Union's 'big five' meeting to chart Europe's relationship with Turkey in parallel to efforts involving all 15 EU members.

But not everyone is opposed to the unofficial way the Union's more heavyweight members try to streamline the cumbersome CFSP decision-making procedures. Only last weekend, Foreign Affairs Commissioner Hans van den Broek floated the idea that with the introduction of more majority voting, the UK, Germany and France should be given greater leeway by their EU partners in return for pledging a more pro-European foreign policy.

While many policy issues still remain unresolved at the IGC, the emphasis in the negotiations has moved clearly to institutional matters. But, acutely aware of the débâcle which followed the last time such sensitive questions were raised in public, all concerned are now carefully walking on eggshells.

It was in 1992 that the then European Commission President Jacques Delors tried to focus minds on the institutional consequences of enlargement.

An internal discussion paper questioned whether small member states could handle the increasing burdens of the rotating EU presidency and raised other sensitive questions. This was immediately seen by many as an attempt to create two categories of Union membership and was an important contributory factor in Denmark's initial rejection of the Maastricht Treaty.

Despite this, EU governments went ahead with a reform of the troika system of past, present and future Union presidencies at their Edinburgh summit a few months later.

On the premiss that the tasks involved would place too great a strain on their resources if the trio did not include at least one of the 'big five' governments, Union leaders reworked the order in which countries took over the six-month role. (In the process, as the current Irish/Dutch/Luxembourg troika demonstrates, they explicitly acknowledged that in such issues the Netherlands should be considered one of the major EU players.)

But the experience of the past few years has left smaller member states particularly sensitive to change and Commission President Jacques Santer, for one, has gone out of his way twice in as many months to pay tribute to the Union's smaller members.

“The Irish presidency has shown that the presidencies of small countries are very fruitful, useful ones. It is because they are more motivated than bigger countries as their only ambition is to serve the Union,” he said last December after a successful Irish turn at the EU helm.

Similarly, Santer welcomed this year's combination of Dutch and Luxembourg presidencies earlier this month, saying: “I am very happy the presidency is falling in 1997 to two member states with which we are personally on the same wavelength.”

Irish Premier John Bruton has also proved a staunch defender of the current presidency system. “When I am asked whether the present system is sustainable, I answer that we cannot do without it. Otherwise, member states cannot understand and recognise other countries' problems. The knowledge and understanding which our public sector acquired is essential for being a full EU member,” he has said.

But while the future of the rotating presidency seems assured, the battle over other institutional changes is still to be fought.

One of the most crucial of these is representation in the Commission. It is widely agreed that there are currently too many members and not enough work. That contrast will be even starker with enlargement. But while eight member states, and the Commission itself, believe the number of Commissioners should be reduced, the idea is strongly resisted by Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Finland and Sweden.

The issue is likely to be one of the last settled in the IGC negotiations, with the efficiency argument pitted against the need to preserve the institution's legitimacy and acceptability.

The most likely compromise is expected to be just one Commissioner per country. Although the big five, which would then lose their second member, have not yet accepted the idea, they may agree to do so in exchange for an extra two votes each in the Council of Ministers. This would give Spain ten votes and Germany, France, the UK and Italy 12 each.

This rebalancing would go some way to averting the unlikely prospect of the big five, representing a large majority of the EU's population, being outvoted by an alliance of smaller member states when decisions are taken by qualified majority.

In order to build in further safeguards, the IGC may also agree to introduce a new legislative hurdle. For proposals to be adopted, they would need the support not only of a qualified majority of votes, but also of governments representing a certain percentage of the Union's population.

Both ideas have a strong chance of being agreed. Such a compromise would lead to a different relationship - but one as balanced as possible - between the EU's larger and smaller member states.

But the IGC is unlikely to tie up all the loose ends.

One postponed decision will affect the European Parliament. With 626 members at present and a likely ceiling of 700, enlargement will inevitably mean a redistribution of seats and drastic measures may be required to prevent the present imbalance between Luxembourg at one end with its six MEPs (each representing 65,000 inhabitants) and Germany at the other with 99 members (each representing 820,000 citizens) from becoming more acute.

The wider democratic issues involved, and the Union's concern to increase its popular legitimacy, may make that an even harder conundrum to solve.