Giscard threat to tear up key part of constitution

Date: 05/06/03

By Dana Spinant

VALERY Giscard d'Estaing has threatened that the Convention on Europe's future will not put forward a key constitutional part of the treaty if member states do not agree to re-open a deal on EU institutions enshrined in the Nice Treaty.

In an interview with European Voice, the Convention chief said that no accord on sharing power between institutions was possible without changing the terms, agreed after tough negotiations at the 2000 summit.

These thrashed out the composition of the European Commission and the voting system in the Council of Ministers.

Nine countries, including three large states - Spain, the UK and Poland - last week ruled out any changes to the Nice agreement on institutions. But it emerged after consultations between Giscard and representatives of governments yesterday (4 June) that 18 current and incoming states are hostile to re-examining the Nice deal.

Spain, in particular, has refused to give up the present voting system - under which each member state has a 'weighted' number of votes in the Council according to its size. Madrid opposes Giscard's 'double majority' proposal, by which laws are adopted if backed by a majority of member states representing a majority of the Union's population.

Giscard told this paper that this position was "not compatible with a durable constitution for the European Union".

The former French president also rejected plans to give the Commission more powers, in exchange for small member states' acceptance of an elected president of the European Council.

He rebuffed a proposal from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg for the president of the Commission to chair the General Affairs Council (GAC).

"There is no chance of a compromise on a proposal of this nature," he said. "It would make the system completely unintelligible".

Giscard also insists that "institutions should not be mixed up.

"As long as we remain in a triangular system [with three institutions] it is not appropriate to mix up competencies of institutions," he said.

His feisty rebuttal is set to anger small member states' leaders who threaten that, if their proposal to boost the Commission is not accepted, there will be no agreement on sharing power in the EU.

"If we don't get this, there will be no draft constitution text to be presented at [the European summit in] Thessaloniki: Giscard will have to present options," one top Dutch diplomat warned. "This is the indispensable quid pro quo for having a stable president of the Council. Our position is clear: if you want this president, then the Commission must preside over the General Affairs Council. Full stop," he added.

Giscard is also likely to upset Europe's largest political grouping, the European People's Party (EPP), which is the dominant force in the Convention.

The leadership of the EPP is working on a compromise proposal, which it hopes could be accepted by the Convention, under which the GAC would be chaired by the Commission.

However, such a plan would "create a conflict between the president of the European Council and the head of the Commission", Giscard claims.

This is because the GAC (which Romano Prodi's successor would chair under the Benelux plan) is politically subordinate to the European Council.

The Convention's chairman warns that the present in-fight between EU institutions is very damaging for the political climate in the Union.

"Our problem, at present, is this fight between institutions - more a bureaucratic fight than a political one," he said.

"Now, we need cooperation, and we need leaders who want to cooperate," he added, in a thinly-veiled criticism of Romano Prodi.

"He [Prodi] made an alliance with the conservative forces [in the Convention] and supports a thesis - that of one commissioner per member state - which weakens the Commission."

"He told me that the best Commission would be one with one member per state but he supports publicly a Commission of 30 members. There is a difference between the two," he said.

Giscard also challenges a statement by Prodi, who said in a recent interview with European Voice that the Commission is the EU's government.

"If we were told that, after some years, Europe will become a state with a central government we would start looking to see what exactly this government would be.

"But this is not the case."

The 77-year-old chair of the Convention blames successive generations of Union leaders for not having reflected on the EU's evolution.

"They were wrong not to think of what Europe would become.

"They thought of it [the EU] as an elastic struture that one could stretch in all directions and extend to new countries through succesive enlargements," he said.

"Now, the idea of a single system for all is being contested, when it is obvious that a Union of 450 million people will function less homogeneously than the 'small Europe'.

"We will have common policies - like the euro, a system of European defence - in which not all member states will participate, some will opt out, but which will remain open [for them to join].

"But the key question is, will these [opt outs] be transitory, or they will be long-lasting?

"I hope they will only be transitory," he said.

The President of the European Convention, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, has threatened not to put forward the part of the EU constitutional treaty that deals with institutional reform unless the EU Member States agree to re-open deal on the EU's institutions contained in the Nice Treaty.