The EU moves on
The European Union has taken an important step towards resolving the impasse into which it had sunk two years ago when proposals for institutional reforms, cast as a Constitutional Treaty, were rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands. Its members have struck a new deal on reform that will allow the EU to operate more effectively both internally and internationally. The accord it has also cleared the ground for a deeper political debate about the future role and nature of the EU – with new leaders offering sharply differing visions.
On 23 June 2007 leaders agreed at a summit in Berlin on what is no longer termed a constitution, but a Reform Treaty. The new document will contain two substantive clauses amending, respectively, the Treaty on European Union (TEU – or Treaty of Nice, 2000) and the Treaty Establishing the European Community (Treaty of Rome, 1957). The former will retain its present name and the latter will be re-titled the Treaty on the Functioning of the Union. A new Intergovernmental Conference to draw up the treaty was launched on 23 July by Portugal, which holds the rotating EU presidency for the second half of 2007. A text is due to be signed by EU leaders in December 2007, and ratification by all 27 member states is expected by 2009.
Since the 2005 referendum defeats, Europe had been wracked by two major challenges. The first involved the institutional mechanisms for effective decision-making. It had long been recognised that institutions originally devised for a grouping of six member states could not work smoothly for 27. The second revolved around the EU’s ethos and its place in the world. What sort of an actor is it? What are its objectives? How does it intend to achieve them? Citizens in different countries hold very different views on the answers to these questions. For example, French voters rejected the treaty partly because it allegedly consecrated ‘Anglo-Saxon liberalism’. But British voters would have rejected it (plans for a referendum were scrapped after the other votes) partly for the opposite reason: because the EU gives too little free rein to market forces.
The referendum defeats took the wind out of the Union’s sails. A period of ‘reflection’ was decreed, during which each member state was to take stock of its own relationship with the EU and decide what to do next. That did not happen. Instead, in almost every country, the EU became a subject not discussed in polite company. The Union drifted until Germany’s EU presidency from January to June 2007, which coincided with a growing sense that it was time to move on. It was generally accepted that no amount of tinkering with the earlier treaty text would have produced guaranteed popular majorities in the Netherlands or France – or the United Kingdom, Poland and several others. The question, therefore, became one of salvaging as much of the previous document as possible while giving the appearance that what was happening was simply an amendment to the existing TEU. The wholesale removal of the word ‘constitution’, and the stress on mere adjustments to the existing treaties, implied that ratification would not require referendums to be held, but could be achieved through parliamentary votes. Newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated that there would be no referendum in France. Gordon Brown, the new UK prime minister, made a similar announcement. The leaders hoped that reforms considered essential for the smooth running of the enlarged EU could be achieved without being disrupted by disillusioned voters. In fact, the resulting Reform Treaty retains most of the features of the scrapped Constitutional Treaty. Two sets of reforms are particularly significant.
Efficient decision-making
The EU’s institutions will be streamlined and rationalised to allow for more effective decision-making, in the following ways:
• The EU will be endowed with a ‘single legal personality’, allowing it to sign international treaties and to operate more smoothly in international organisations, such as the World Bank, which admit non-state participants. The new status will explicitly not allow the Union to legislate or act beyond the competencies conferred upon it by the member states.
• A range of new policy areas will be subjected to qualified majority voting (QMV). With 27 members, this measure has become indispensable. The new areas include transport, energy, space, science, sport, the budget and some aspects of cross-border crime and policing. An ‘emergency brake’ system will apply in some sensitive areas to protect member states with special interests. The Reform Treaty will be self-amending in that a decision to extend the policy areas subject to QMV will not require a new treaty, though every member state will retain a veto over this process.
• Cumbersome voting coefficients agreed in the TEU will be replaced by a ‘double majority’ system. A decision will be adopted in the Council – the EU’s main decision-making body, attended by one minister from each country – if it is supported by 55% of member states representing at least 65% of the overall EU population. Poland, which fares much better under the Nice system, negotiated a delay until 2014 in the inauguration of the double-majority system, which will even then only be phased in over a further three years.
• The six-monthly rotating presidency will be replaced by a formal new position, the President of the Council, appointed for two and a half years, renewable once. Other institutional changes provide slightly greater powers to both national parliaments and the European Parliament. The latter body will elect the President of the Commission, the body which manages the execution of EU policies. Instead of each country nominating one commissioner, as at present, the number of commissioners will be equal to two-thirds of the number of member states, with each country nominating individuals on a rotating basis.
The EU’s global role
The reforms are also designed to make the EU more effective as a global actor, with a more coherent and audible voice. The key innovation is the long-awaited creation of the post of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The new position combines the post now held by Javier Solana, the Spanish official whose title is High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), with the functions of the Commissioner for External Relations, currently Benita Ferrero-Waldner of Austria. The position will be the only one in the EU which involves a presence in both the Council and the Commission. This will allow the High Representative to coordinate the two main thrusts of the EU’s external policy: security and overseas development aid. The post-holder will contribute to the formulation and implementation of the CFSP and the European Security and Defence Policy, and will chair the newly named Foreign Affairs Council, replacing the six-monthly rotating presidency in this task. The High Representative will represent the Union in international organisations and at international conferences, and will ‘conduct political dialogue’ on the Union’s behalf. The position comes close to meeting Henry Kissinger’s 30-year-old demand for a ‘telephone number’ for Europe. Wielding the legitimacy conferred by the Council and the extensive resources flowing from the Commission, the High Representative will be an individual of considerable influence, able to streamline foreign and security policy and to give it far greater coherence and impact. However, there will be substantial limitations: foreign and security policies remain resolutely, in EU terminology, ‘intergovernmental’. Tensions between Brussels and national capitals will continue in any policy area where a member state feels it has a vital national interest to defend. For example, during the disagreements among EU members over the Iraq war in 2003, Solana’s voice was in effect silenced.
A reform that will confer greater influence on the High Representative is the planned EU External Action Service. This is aimed to combine the experience and professionalism of diplomacy at the national level with the capacity and resources which can be mobilised at European level. However, many questions about the make-up of this new EU diplomatic service remain unresolved, and its specific tasks are undefined. It will be difficult and time-consuming – and will require political will – to render coherent the new service’s work and that of the existing 1,362 embassies run by EU member states in third countries.
Competing visions
The June agreement, as well as the arrival of new European leaders, set the stage for a new period of discussion and jockeying about Europe’s future. One important question was whether the new leaders could work together to give impetus to the new institutional mechanisms. German Chancellor Angela Merkel emerged from the German presidency with a greatly enhanced political stature. The June Berlin Council meeting demonstrated her considerable skills as a deal-maker and consensus-shaper. She is a pragmatist, determined to make the EU work. Sarkozy also took credit for pushing the Reform Treaty through. The two are on a much closer political wavelength than any Franco-German couple since the late 1980s, and Sarkozy has pledged that the Franco-German motor will remain the driving force behind EU policy. While Britain is, as usual, the big mystery in terms of its approach to the EU, Gordon Brown, coming from the centre-left, is nevertheless close on issues of social and economic policy to Merkel and Sarkozy, who are from the centre-right. However, he could well clash with the latter over protectionism and the role of the state. Franco-British cooperation is indispensable for the smooth working of the EU security and defence policy, which was initiated by a 1998 agreement between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, respectively the predecessors of Brown and Sarkozy. But in this area Brown, finance minister for the past 10 years, has no track record at all.
The second, broader question concerned the leaders’ vision for the future of Europe. In an uncompromising speech in Strasbourg on 2 July 2007, Sarkozy counter-posed two basic visions: the EU as a process and the EU as a project. The former involved an approach in which the means were everything – regulation, rules, institutions, procedures. The latter involved a belief in finalité – a finite entity with a political objective and a clear purpose in the world. His most crucial objective was to force a political debate about the EU’s definitive borders: without clear borders, he argued, there could be no European identity and, therefore, no political objective or project. For Sarkozy, the EU was a ‘civilisation project’, safeguarding an idea of man and of civilisation first threatened by world wars, then by the Cold War and now by the ‘flattening’ process of globalisation, which was provoking a clash of identities and cultures. Sarkozy believes that Turkey’s accession would kill off such a European project by reducing the EU to a mere process. Turkey, he insists, is not a European country: its entry would prevent the EU from being a global power and would rule out any prospect of forging a European identity.
Such a vision of Europe, while comprehensible and attractive to many EU member states, flies directly in the face of what many in the UK see as Europe’s purpose. The British vision is more one of process than of project. It has traditionally been about pragmatism rather than identity, about markets more than politics, about enlarging rather than deepening, about opting-out rather than integrating, about embracing globalisation rather than resisting it. Such an approach, which seems likely to be that preferred by Brown, has some resonance in countries such as Denmark and Sweden. It clashes with Sarkozy’s project. But Sarkozy was unequivocal: without protection against unfair competition from outside, there could be no European solidarity. Without definitive borders, there would be no Europe.
These two visions of the EU’s future seem set to define Europe’s political battles over the next decade. They appear irreconcilable, and cannot fail to provoke an impassioned and divisive debate. The likelihood is that member states will be forced to choose between two strategies: that of participating actively in the comprehensive political project; and that of clinging to the process, accepting those regulations and procedures which correlate with national preferences, and opting out of the others. The result would be a two-speed EU constructed around a dynamic core and a marginalised periphery.
