Will Giscard’s Convention give Europe a face-lift…or merely a makeover?

Date: 21/02/02

Think-tanks are cooking up ideas for the Convention on the future of Europe. Dick Leonard assesses radical proposals on electing the President of the Commission and transforming EU foreign policy,

THE European Convention on Treaty reform gets down to work next Thursday (28 February) under the chairmanship of former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

It has a crowded agenda, starting with 56 specific questions drawn up by the EU heads of government at their summit in Laeken in December.

The Convention members have, however, been left the freedom to broaden the debate, and a large number of voluntary organisations are queuing up to present their own views.

Already this week, two left-of-centre think-tanks have burst into print with proposals they wish the Convention to take into account.

First off is the London-based Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), whose pamphlet, Linking National Parliaments to Europe, is written by Simon Hix, of the London School of Economics.

Dr Hix, a leading authority on European institutions, is not in favour of having a second chamber for the European Parliament selected from national MPs, as suggested by both Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer, nor does he commend Lionel Jospin's idea of a standing conference of MEPs and MPs.

These proposals, he believes, would only serve to slow proceedings by introducing a further level of decision-makers. Instead, his novel suggestion is that national MPs should elect the president of the European Commission.

This would not only provide national parliaments with a much greater direct influence within the EU, but would also be a more democratic and effective way of choosing the Union's most important actor. The existing method of a consensus choice behind closed doors by the EU heads of government is now thoroughly discredited, not least because it allows a single prime minister to veto the preference of all his colleagues.

This is why, under the Nice Treaty, future choices will be made by qualified majority vote.

Hix doubts whether this would be much of an improvement, which leads him to discuss more democratic alternatives - such as a ballot by MEPs or a popular election. Neither method would be satisfactory, he believes - at least for the foreseeable future.

The biggest drawback is that elections to the European Parliament and - he hypothesises - also a direct election of the Commission president are seen as 'second order' elections, in which only a minority of voters are likely to participate.

He cites as evidence that the turnout in Euro-elections has averaged 28 less than that in polls for national parliaments.

In order to ensure that an indirect election would be as widely representative as possible, he suggests that candidates would need to secure the backing of at least 5 of MPs in two-thirds of the member states.

The effect of this would be to ensure that the leading candidates would come from the main transnational political parties: the European People's Party, the Party of European Socialists, the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party and the European Federation of Green Parties.

The votes of national MPs would be weighted to take account of national representation in the European Parliament (roughly proportionate to population, with a slight bias in favour of the smaller countries).

In an appendix, Hix sets out an impressively detailed scenario of how his proposal might work out in practice.

He acknowledges his debt to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who designed an indirect election - through the electoral college - for the choice of US president.

That later developed into direct democracy, with the electoral college becoming largely a paper institution, and under Hix's proposal it would be possible for any national parliament to opt instead for a popular vote.

This, he believes, may well be the long-term consequence of increasing public interest in the choice of Commission president.

A paper produced by the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, Making European Foreign Policy (CFSP) Effective, draws attention to the major discrepancy between the effectiveness of its diplomatic efforts and those of the US.

The author, Eberhard Rhein, a retired senior EU official, asserts that 'the EU 25' (the current member states plus the 10 leading candidates) disposes of 'by far the biggest foreign policy machinery on earth'.

Each of the member states, he writes, maintains between 30 and 200 diplomatic missions inside and outside the EU, in addition to 100 run by the European Commission.

Jointly, the EU 25 afford themselves 'the luxury of almost 3,000 missions with a total number of close to 30,000 diplomats. The USA needs less than one- tenth of the missions and half the diplomatic staff to 'impose' its foreign policy views on the rest of the world'.

European foreign policy consists of two separate strands - a national one and a European one, which since the Maastricht Treaty has been defined as 'common'.

Rhein suggests that the Common Foreign and Security Policy should henceforth be conducted by the Commission missions, which would be upgraded into EU embassies.

These should be controlled by the High Representative for the CFSP, currently Javier Solana, who would become a member of the Commission.

Both the Commission and the European Parliament should be given an enhanced role in the CFSP, he argues, and Council decisions in this area should be subject to qualified majority voting, except where defence issues were concerned.

Hix and Rhein raise very different issues, but common to their proposals is that they are both highly controversial and raise fundamental issues rather than the largely cosmetic matters which all too often have dominated the agenda of inter-governmental conferences in the past. The Convention may choose not to endorse their ideas, but it should at least give them serious consideration.

Think-tanks are cooking up ideas for the Convention on the future of Europe. Author assesses radical proposals on electing the President of the Commission and transforming EU policy.