Forging a common approach

Date: 29/02/1996

THE battle lines are being drawn, the participants taking up their positions in preparation for the fray as the clock ticks away towards the start of the Intergovernmental Conference.

With just four weeks to go before the Maastricht review is launched, groups of EU governments who share common interests on the key issues to be addressed at the IGC are meeting to prepare coordinated strategies for the forthcoming negotiations.

Bonn and Paris announced this week that they had forged a joint approach to the all-important issue of building a genuine common foreign and security policy.

Only a short while ago, those who would prefer to see an inconclusive IGC where little of substance is agreed pointed to the frailty of the Franco-German axis in the wake of Jacques Chirac's election as French president as evidence of growing disarray in the EU's ranks over its future development.

If the two countries which have provided the impetus for past moves towards closer European integration could not agree, they argued, what hope was there of getting all 15 member states to sanction major changes to the Maastricht Treaty.

But despite Chirac's apparent ambivalence towards Europe during the French election campaign and in the early months of his presidency, whatever cracks there might have been in the relationship between Paris and Bonn have now been papered over.

Meanwhile, the Benelux countries, who as some of the EU's smallest member states have a real interest in presenting a united front at the IGC negotiating table, will meet next week to devise a common strategy, and the Nordic countries are planning a similar gathering to see what common ground they share.

The most notable absentee at this round of highly-publicised meetings is the UK government, which is concentrating instead on drawing up a White Paper on European policy designed more to heal the divisions within its own party over Europe than to tell the rest of the EU what it wants - or, to put it more accurately, does not want - out of the IGC.

None of this should be taken to suggest that there will not be real disagreements between the other 14 member states and that the UK is the only country likely to cause problems during the negotiations.

Each government has its own agenda to pursue and is likely to find itself at loggerheads with others on specific issues of particular importance to it.

But the recent flurry of activity suggests that most EU governments remain convinced of the need for real progress at the IGC and are determined to do their utmost to achieve it. The doomsayers who fear that little substantive progress will be made, and the sceptics who love to claim that others are coming round to their way of thinking, may yet be proven wrong. There is still a long way to go.