‘Worst treaty in EU history’ could sour relations for years

Date: 14/12/00

By Simon Taylor

IT WAS never going to be a nice treaty. But few could have anticipated just how nasty it would turn out to be.

As EU leaders emerged bleary-eyed with a final deal at 4.30am on Monday, each and every one damned the accord they had just wrapped up with faint praise.

French President Jacques Chirac, universally seen as the arch villain of the piece, made the most valiant effort to hail the agreement, saying it would go down in EU history as a great success. But a beaten and battered-looking Romano Prodi produced the understatement of the week when he said: "We harbour some regrets that we did not achieve more."

Tired negotiators were quick to dissociate themselves from the fruit of their labours. "This is the worst treaty the European Union has ever come up with," said one.

There are three key reasons why Europe's political class are so embarrassed.

One, the large countries achieved a major power grab at the expense of their smaller neighbours in a manner which could poison relations for years to come. Two, the agreement fails to prepare the ground for enlargement because the new voting rules complicate decision-making enormously. Three, the role of Prodi and the Commission was reduced to that of the humble secretariat that Chirac proposed in his Berlin speech in June.

The French president was responsible for all three.

First, he managed to forge a united front among the four largest member states with his first proposals for a new share-out of votes in the Council of Ministers on Saturday morning. After that, he gradually picked off the small and medium-sized countries one by one with a few extra votes here and concessions there, starting with the Dutch and finishing with Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, but not without furious clashes both in private and in public.

Then, because he steadfastly refused to give up France's parity of votes with Germany, even when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder suggested that just one more would be enough, Chirac killed any chance of a rational deal on reweighting. To reflect Germany's 22 million extra citizens, Chirac tabled a plan which would allow Berlin to block decisions if it could club together with other large states representing 38% of the EU's population.

Instead of a deal which will streamline decision-making after enlargement, Nice produced a triple majority system which one negotiator described as "consensus minus three".

The reweighting negotiations also opened a second front in Chirac's attack on the Commission. He had already excluded Prodi and his team at key points in the negotiations, starting with the 'confessionals' on Friday and culminating in the final redrafting of the agreement on trade policy, when even French Commissioner Pascal Lamy was kept out of the room - although it was in fact the Finns who drafted the final version in collusion with the Commission.

But more significantly, giving Germany and two other big member states the power to block any legislation they dislike means that in the future, the Commission will be forced to seek approval from Berlin, London, Paris or Rome before launching any controversial new initiatives.

The sense that the final deal was the tawdriest in EU history and would only store up trouble for the future has prompted an unprecedented outbreak of soul searching about how to conduct future treaty reforms

But it is hard to see how Nice could have turned out differently. The negotiations on a new division of power were chaired by a country which has never been ashamed to pursue its national interest and by a president who believes that what is best for France is best for the EU.

In the past, another Frenchman, former Commission President Jacques Delors, might have denounced the deal rather than leaving it to the Belgian prime minister. The fact that his successor did not reflects the reality that the Union is increasingly dominated by its largest member states.

Smaller member states and the Commission may complain, but there is not much they can do about it.