Governments dig in for IGC battle

Date: 14/03/1996

By Rory Watson

RADICALLY different blueprints for the future of the EU will be on the table when Union leaders meet in Turin in a fortnight to begin negotiations on the reform of the Maastricht Treaty.

As governments put the finishing touches to their opening positions, the depth of the divisions between member states on key issues is coming into focus and highlighting the difficulty of reaching a consensus on the kind of Union needed for the 21st century.

In the space of just 24 hours, both France and the UK tabled plans to rein in the power of core institutions such as the European Commission and Parliament while increasing the role of national governments and legislatures.

French Prime Minister Alain Juppé said yesterday (13 March): “Since there is no question of creating a European super-state, the political centre of gravity of the Union cannot reside in the Commission and European Parliament, but on the contrary in the representative organs of member states: the Council and (national) parliaments.”

The same tone had been struck the previous day by British Prime Minister John Major. Introducing his government's White Paper for the Intergovernmental Conference, he declared: “The bedrock of the European Union is the independent, democratic nation state.”

Both governments are currently involved in an unseemly dispute with their 13 partners over their opposition to giving MEPs observer status in the IGC process. Their hostility prompted French Socialist MEP Elisabeth Guigou to challenge Italian Foreign Minister Susanna Agnelli to be “courageous” and put the issue to a vote in Turin. Agnelli, who will make a final effort to broker a deal on 25 March, told MEPs in Strasbourg that the Parliament had a role to play in the search for answers to the challenges of the next millenium. She pledged she would do her utmost “to try and give a voice to the European Parliament” in the IGC.

France also aims to set clear limits on the Commission's role, restricting this to purely Community affairs such as external trade, the single market and agriculture, and preventing any involvement in sensitive internal and external security issues.

French European Affairs Minister Michel Barnier opened a new line of attack on the institution this week by calling for an end to the current system under which each member state has a Commissioner. Reasoning that its work covered just 10 major sectors, he argued that one member should be in charge of each in a team appointed by the Commission president.

But any move to prevent a country nominating its own Commissioner will be strongly resisted by smaller states. Portugal, anticipating such a move, spelt out its opposition in the IGC policy paper it approved last week, with Foreign Minister Jaime Gama insisting: “Institutional reform cannot lead to a reduction of the powers of small and medium member states.”

French and British efforts to restrict the powers of MEPs and Commission run diametrically counter to views emerging from Germany and the three Benelux countries.

The Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg prime ministers will categorically call for consolidation of the Commission's role and an increase in its responsibilities in the IGC negotiations.

A ten-page position paper adopted by all three governments argues for greater executive powers and a specific role for the institution in internal and external security issues. It also favours greater legislative powers for the European Parliament.

Differing views are also emerging over interpretation of the new concept of flexibility.

Supporting the idea, Juppé predicted it would allow “a small number of states around France and Germany who are ready and willing to go further or faster than the others on issues such as currency and defence”.

But the danger that too much flexibility could lead to a hard core of EU countries establishing a different agenda has been raised by Poland, potentially one of the next wave of countries to join the Union. Jan Kulakowski, the country's ambassador to the EU, warned this week: “We cannot accept a European architecture with different aims, with some in the core and some on the periphery ... We can accept a different rhythm, but we cannot accept some having a vocation different from others. It is a dangerous idea.”