European leaders gather to assess embryonic treaty

Date: 05/12/1996

By Rory Watson

JOKES are a rare commodity among experienced European Union negotiators - aware that humour in one culture may inadvertently cause offence in another as it travels across linguistic divides.

But the Irish EU presidency team handling the complex Intergovernmental Conference negotiations has one witticism which it considers an apt analogy in any language for the labours involved in revising the Maastricht Treaty.

As he looked ahead to next week's European summit in Dublin, Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring recently recounted the following joke to an international audience in London.

“Why is the process of European integration like two elephants making love?” he asked. “There are three reasons. First, the gestation period for any results will be at least 11 months. Secondly, the negotiations take place at a reasonably high level and thirdly, each small advance is greeted by loud trumpetings.”

The pregnancy which will eventually give birth to a rejuvenated Maastricht Treaty next summer will be nearer 15 than 11 months, but there will still be much trumpeting when EU leaders meet next week.

To casual observers, there are few outward signs of any significant development in the embryo since the early days after conception in the spring.

But a closer examination reveals clearly the main shape of the final treaty which EU leaders aim to endorse at their Amsterdam summit in mid-June 1997.

In what outgoing Irish IGC chairman Noel Dorr likes to describe as a process of “successive approximations” government negotiators have narrowed their differences on a wide range of issues. The scale of that emerging consensus will become clear in the draft outline of a revised Maastricht Treaty which the Irish government will present to EU foreign ministers tomorrow (6 December) and then officially table at the summit on 13 December.

Spring has emphatically confirmed to his EU colleagues that his government has no intention of using the Dublin meeting to close off options. “Each member state will be free to continue to hold its position on all aspects of the emerging settlement. Dublin will not be the stage of trade-offs at which an agreed overall package emerges,” he insisted.

But the Friday afternoon discussion on the IGC negotiations will be an opportunity for government leaders to pass judgement on the direction the Union is taking.

It will also enable them to reconfirm the view they expressed at their last summit in Dublin in October that the EU should be given stronger weapons to tackle unemployment, drugs and organised crime.

The Irish text will suggest introducing two new chapters into the existing Maastricht Treaty.

The more significant of these would herald the creation of “an area of freedom, security and justice” in which all EU institutions would be involved, setting out specific measures to consolidate (possibly within one to three years) the free movement of people within the Union, to handle the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, and to strengthen the EU's defences against illegal immigrants.

The draft treaty will also include recognition that the Union's responsibilities for job creation should be better defined and spell out possible ways of ensuring improved coordination between member states' employment policies.

The concept of sustainable development will be written into the central objectives of the Union alongside the need to raise living standards and promote closer relations between member states.

What impact the insertion of such pledges will have on these two central policy areas remains to be seen, but the existence of specific commitments in the draft revised treaty will strengthen the hand of those advocating pan-European action.

There is similar widespread agreement on the need for new wording to be included on greater transparency and the right of information, on the protection of basic human rights, on opposition to any form of discrimination and on the need for national parliaments to have a greater say on EU initiatives.

IGC negotiators have not only made significant progress on the range of issues designed to bring the Union closer to its citizens, but they have also travelled a fair distance along the road towards reshaping the EU's foreign policy provisions.

The draft treaty will confirm that the Union should take on, as a matter of course, the Petersberg humanitarian tasks and that, as a general principle, the cost of joint actions should be borne by the EU budget rather than being paid for out of national funds.

It will also confirm the decision to create a fully-fledged analysis unit and the death of the French idea of appointing a Union foreign policy supremo. A consensus also exists on the need to replace the troika of immediate past, present and future EU presidencies with one composed of the Foreign Affairs Commissioner, the Council of Ministers secretary-general and the presidency.

The incoming Dutch presidency will face the remaining challenges of streamlining the Union's complex decision-making procedures and producing a formula to settle differences between the Commission and certain member states over the handling of international negotiations on services and intellectual property.

The one glaring gap in the embryonic treaty remains the issue crying out loudest for reform in view of the anticipated pressure of Union enlargement to around a dozen new members.

EU leaders will be presented with draft treaty articles reducing the number of decision-making procedures from over 20 to just three and extending the scope of legislative powers shared by the European Parliament and national governments.

But the sensitive issues of national vetoes, qualified majority voting, the number of Commissioners and the Franco-German concept of policy flexibility will be absent.

Treaty texts on these will only emerge at the Amsterdam summit in six months' time. That is when it will become clear whether there are really grounds for trumpeting or not.