Operating backwards

Álvaro Mendonça e Moura, Portugal’s ambassador to the EU, gave an entertaining description of how his country would handle the forthcoming intergovernmental conference (IGC) to negotiate a new EU treaty.

Speaking to the European Policy Centre last week (11 June), Mendonça e Moura said: "We will operate backwards."

Unlike normal IGCs, where the shape of the agreement is only clear at the end of the process, the end product will be all but decided this week at the summit of EU leaders. As Mendonça e Moura said: "The deal must be solid before we even start to negotiate formally."

Portugal has experience with IGCs, having launched the one in 2000 that led to the Nice treaty.

Portugal’s task will be to turn the outline due to be agreed at this week’s summit (21-22 June) into a treaty text. EU diplomats say that around 80% of the drafting work has already been done and some suggest that the IGC could be concluded as soon as October and approved by EU leaders at their informal summit meeting in Lisbon on 18 October.

The difficult part of assembling the collective political will to agree the outline of a new treaty should have been performed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her presidency team, leaving the Portuguese with the technical aspects of finalising the new document. But the underlying issues remain deeply divisive, especially if Poland insists on a re-examination of the voting weight system agreed in the constitution.

As Mendonça e Moura said last week: "We have the institutional memory. But we can only have the Union succeed with the help of all others."

Álvaro Mendonça e Moura, Portugal’s ambassador to the EU, gave an entertaining description of how his country would handle the forthcoming intergovernmental conference (IGC) to negotiate a new EU treaty.