Race is on for IGC deadline

Date: 20/03/1997

By Rory Watson

THE Dutch government is cracking the whip over the heads of its EU partners as the race to complete negotiations on reform of the Union by mid-June enters the final furlong.

The change of pace will become apparent early next week when Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo will advise his colleagues that they must play a more prominent role in the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations if a revised Maastricht Treaty is to be agreed within the next three months.

“He will tell them to give greater substance to their ministerial meetings. In some areas it is clear that the discussions in the personal representatives' group have gone as far as they can at that level. Now ministers have to give a clear political mandate to the negotiators,” explained a senior Dutch official.

The ministerial meeting in Rome next Tuesday (25 March) will be the first since British Premier John Major announced that the UK general election would be held on 1 May.

In order to prevent the IGC negotiations becoming a political football in the UK election campaign, the Dutch EU presidency has carefully avoided tabling a new treaty text.

Instead, the Rome meeting will be presented with five separate 'addenda' - on fundamental rights, the Union's legal personality, justice and home affairs, a common foreign and security policy and flexibility - to the existing draft presented last December.

As the Dutch approach the half-way point of their six-month presidency, European Affairs Minister Michiel Patijn acknowledged last week that a number of controversial issues, particularly institutional questions, still needed to be resolved. But he remained optimistic that a deal could be reached by the June Amsterdam summit.

“I would say we are probably two-thirds down the road, although of course you cannot prove that mathematically. But a lot of business can be done in the last three months of the IGC and the real negotiations are only starting now,” he said.

As governments survey the IGC landscape, a clear picture of the state of play in one of the most complex areas of negotiation - justice and home affairs - is contained in a remarkably detailed and wide-ranging analysis published by the Danish foreign ministry.

It reveals that all member states, with the sole exception of Denmark and the UK, support moves to take immigration, asylum, visa and border issues out of purely national control and make them full Union responsibilities. The two dissidents want them to remain in intergovernmental hands.

A number of countries - Italy, Austria, Greece, Finland and Germany - are even more communautaire and would like to transfer other (unspecified) items from the so-called third to first pillars.

EU governments appear evenly divided over how to handle other issues, such as judicial and police cooperation, which would continue to be dealt with on an intergovernmental basis.

While France, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Finland, Italy and Greece believe decision-making would be more efficient if there was greater use of majority voting instead of unanimity, another group comprising the UK, Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden and the Netherlands is opposed.

Similar deep divisions have emerged over the trigger for enhanced cooperation which would allow a group of member states to forge ahead and integrate certain policies more closely, without waiting for those who wanted to move at a slower pace.

According to the Danish paper, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Finland and Luxembourg believe the decision to apply the flexibility principle should be taken by a majority vote while six countries, led by the UK and Denmark, favour unanimity.

The Danish analysis also confirms the split between the EU's larger and smaller states over the ideal number of Commissioners as the Union expands.

The big five (Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain) want to set a ceiling, while the rest are insisting on one representative per country.