Sound and fury in debate on Union’s future

Date: 22/06/2000

Union leaders are a long way off agreeing the reforms needed to prepare the bloc for enlargement. Yet the air at this week's summit in Feira was alive with ambitious new schemes for closer European integration. Simon Taylor explains why

This week's summit of EU leaders in Feira made little tangible progress towards agreeing the treaty reforms needed to prepare the Union for enlargement.

But while EU governments are still a long way off settling the arguments over the new share-out of votes in the Council of Ministers and European Commission posts, the air is alive with bold schemes for further integration.

The new buzz-words are 'enhanced cooperation' - the possibility of changing the Union treaty to make it easier for groups of member states to pool their powers in new areas even if others did not want to join in. In the run-up to the summit, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer also ruffled a few feathers with his neo-federalist vision of a Europe with a written constitution and a two-chamber parliament.

Even though member states are still divided according to size on the narrow range of issues being tackled by the current Intergovernmental Conference, it is possible to discern the outlines of the final deal from the discussions in Feira.

The principle of one Commissioner per member state is almost certain to survive. As a trade-off, the bigger countries may get a better share-out of the votes than they expected. But whatever the final deal on reweighting, it will fall short of a system based solely on a country's size, which would see Germany wielding 18 votes compared to 15 for the UK and France.

Identifying the areas of EU decision-making where member states could agree to give up their national vetoes and move to qualified majority voting is harder, although a Portuguese paper published on the eve of the summit listed 39 areas where it might be possible to move away from unanimity.

But keeping national vetoes is a bit like sin. Everyone thinks it is a bad thing in principle but they will not give up their own vices.

Even arch-supporters of the move to extend qualified majority voting to as many areas as possible dig their heels in when it comes the issues most sensitive for them. For the French, it is trade; for Germany, asylum and immigration policy.

The French intend to step up the IGC work-rate after they take over the EU presidency on 1 July, with weekly meetings of officials and a monthly session with foreign ministers before each Council get-together to ensure that good progress is made by the time Union leaders meet again for a special IGC summit in Biarritz in October.

Given the state of play in the IGC discussions, some question the wisdom of launching a wide-ranging debate about new degrees of integration now, given the risk that it will open old wounds. So why has it happened?

The obvious answer appears to be that the prospect of enlargement is casting a dark shadow over the IGC talks. As if the Union did not face enough financial and political problems in preparing to take in up to 13 new members ranging from former Communist countries in central and eastern Europe to past enemies such as Cyprus and Turkey, EU governments are also worried that the new intake could block attempts to harmonise policies in areas which have not yet been brought within the Union's remit.

These fears have manifested themselves in the debate during the Portuguese presidency on easing the rules governing enhanced cooperation. This mechanism was created as part of the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty as a way for hard-core integrationists to push ahead in areas which the sceptics could not sign up to. But EU governments attached a number of very tough conditions to the use of this device.

The debate now is about whether some of these can be eased. A number of ideas have been floated to lower the hurdles to invoking the mechanism, including scrapping member states' right to veto any plans which they are uncomfortable with and reducing the number of EU governments needed to go ahead with enhanced cooperation. Finding eight out of the 15 current member states willing to take part, as required under the current rules, is an easier proposition than finding a majority of 15 countries in an expanded Union of 28 member states.

But UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Spanish counterpart José Maria

Aznar have led the way in warning that any lowering of the bar to enhanced cooperation risks creating a second class group of member states. They point out that although the mechanism has existed since Amsterdam, no member state has ever suggested using it to date. They also argue that the move would send a negative signal to the applicant countries that the Union they are struggling so hard to join will leave them behind not long after they get in.

Portuguese State Secretary for European Affairs Seixas da Costa has tried to dispel such fears and reassure applicants the proposed changes to the enhanced cooperation rules are not intended to safeguard the EU against the risk that new members will lock it into the status quo when they join. "Enhanced cooperation is not a protection against enlargement. It is a way to guarantee that you can go ahead in future," he said last week.

While the sceptics were prepared to entertain the idea of making it easier to invoke the mechanism at Feira, Fischer's speech calling for a "European federation" with a law-making and power-wielding European government sent shock waves through Paris and other national capitals.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine warned that a wider debate on Europe's future would jeopardise plans to complete the treaty reform negotiations by the end of this year. "If the 15 were not to agree on the reweighting, qualified majority, the size of the Commission and stronger cooperation, what good would it do to speculate, pitting us against each other about what Europe will become in 10 or 20 years?" he said.

Yet despite all the sound and fury about what needs to be done to prevent enlargement from impeding the Union's development, the debate seems fixated on old arguments about classical forms of co-operation between EU member states, with the Commission keeping the exclusive right to present draft legislation and police member states' compliance with laws they have signed up to in Brussels.

The discussions ignore the fact that governments are increasingly choosing different forms of co-operation depending on which they think is most effective to secure real progress in a particular area. EU co-operation in justice and home affairs only came about after governments gingerly agreed to work together in one of the most sensitive areas of national policy. The advances in creating a security and defence policy for the Union have been achieved while deliberately excluding the Commission and working solely on a government-to-government basis.

Even the high point of the Portuguese presidency, the 'dot.com' summit in Lisbon, represented a new way of working which largely kept the Commission at arm's length and depended on one-to-one relations between Portugal and other national governments, a model described as "the open coordination method".

In a new book on the future of Europe, Dutch State Secretary for European Affairs Dick Benschop argues that integration these days means a combination of formal and informal mechanisms. He highlights the increasing use of peer review and benchmarking, as in the fields of budgetary and employment policy, where governments try to match the best performance of others.

"The new mode of integration works best in cases where European cooperation is necessary, but where extra legislation and funds from Brussels are clearly not the answer," says Benschop, who predicts that this trend will continue. "The future of Europe will be characterised less than in the past by mammoth treaties, blueprints imposed by Brussels and endless debates about subsidiarity and the like."

The debate about enhanced cooperation reflects the current agonising over whether enlargement will set the current arrangements for political relations in stone. Yet a study of the ways which EU governments have found to work together in recent years shows that the answers to this dilemma are already out there.

Major feature. Union leaders are a long way off agreeing the reforms needed to prepare the bloc for enlargement. Yet the air at the recent summit in Feira was alive with ambitious new schemes for closer European integration.