Sarkozy’s “Committee of Wise Men” to Contemplate Long Term Plans for European Union
MSNBC/Financial Times | October 23, 2007
By Tony Barber
The organisational question is at the centre of everything.- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The European Union of the early 21st century is not the Russian empire of 100 years earlier, but Lenin's axiom could be borne in mind this week as EU leaders gather for a landmark summit in Portugal.
The EU's 27 member states hope to approve a "reform treaty" whose birth pangs have caused the bloc perhaps more distress than any episode in its 50-year history. As so often, organisational questions have been the root of the trouble.
In the absence of last-minute shocks, the treaty will be approved at the Lisbon summit and the EU will declare itself back on track. Anything less would be a political and public relations disaster. "The general view is that Lisbon will be successful. Failure would not destroy the treaty from a technical point of view but, after all the EU has been through, everyone knows it would look awful," one Brussels-based ambassador says.
Unlike the ill-starred constitutional treaty that gave rise to the EU's crisis, the redrafted 250-page document is stuffed with so many declarations and protocols attached to the main text that only masochists and lawyers will be tempted to keep a copy by their bedsides. Even idealistic believers in deeper European integration admit the treaty is stodgy. Opponents call it indigestible.
Dullness and impenetrability are, however, different qualities from indispensability. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, European leaders regard the treaty as an essential starting point for strengthening the EU's internal mechanisms and extending what they view as Europe's benign diplomatic, commercial and cultural influence across the world. As José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, puts it, the treaty will give the EU "the capacity to act in the interests of its citizens through more coherence externally, more efficient decision-making and more democratic accountability".
From the standpoint of political self-interest, the treaty is no less indispensable. By adopting it at the two-day summit on Thursday and Friday, the EU aims to emerge from more than two years of introspection that have damaged its self-confidence, disrupted its pursuit of its worldwide interests and drawn attention to the European public's dwindling appetite for visionary projects.
About time, too, the EU's friends in the rest of Europe, the US and Asia would say. Numerous international challenges lie ahead for the EU, from Iran's nuclear aspirations to the increasingly frosty relationship with a reinvigorated Russia, from managing large-scale immigration from non-EU countries to honouring Europe's pledge to be a leader in the switch to a low-carbon economy. The world needs an actively engaged, smoothly running EU.
True, the EU has hardly ground to a halt since the turmoil that erupted when French and Dutch voters rejected the constitutional treaty in the referendums of May and June 2005. Doomsayers predicted paralysis if the institutional changes contained in that treaty were not introduced to accommodate the EU's expansion from 15 members in early 2004 to 27 today. But in reality the EU has continued to function.
"This was the dog that didn't bark," one EU ambassador says. "At every meeting you have 27 countries around a table, but on average only seven or eight speak, at most 12 or 13. So gridlock is avoided."
Nevertheless, by common consent of EU governments, things cannot go on indefinitely as they are. With its borders extending from Russia to North Africa and its power as a business regulator felt everywhere from California to Taiwan, the EU needs to adapt. New challenges require stronger institutions, more efficient working practices and greater transparency. The decision-making process also requires room for more majority voting, even if the EU cherishes its time-honoured practice of reaching decisions by consensus wherever possible.
By addressing these issues, the new treaty sets down the foundation stone of the EU's future. The organisational detail may be tedious and obscure but it is what makes the EU tick. In this respect, Lenin got it right.
If all goes well this week, EU leaders will regroup in Lisbon in December for a formal signing ceremony and national governments will ratify the treaty one by one in time for elections to the European parliament in June 2009. Having learnt a bitter lesson from the French and Dutch referendums, the EU will take few chances this time. Almost all countries will submit the treaty for ratification to their parliaments, where approval is virtually guaranteed. Only Ireland is constitutionally obliged to hold a referendum.
EU diplomats in Brussels expect a positive outcome in Ireland - but no one forgets that Irish voters caused an upset in June 2001 by rejecting the Treaty of Nice, the EU's last big institutional settlement. "Calling a referendum is like asking out a girl to the cinema. When she says no, you don't know if she's saying no to you or to the film," one diplomat jokes.
In the UK, opposition Conservatives as well as trade unions have piled pressure on Gordon Brown, prime minister, to hold a referendum. Eurosceptic Tories are convinced that Britain's voters, famously unmoved by grand notions of European unity, would probably reject the treaty. To the relief of other EU leaders, fearful of an even bigger crisis if this treaty went the way of its predecessor, Mr Brown has firmly dismissed calls to put it to the people.
Yet the Labour government's argument that the new document is so different from the constitutional treaty that no referendum is necessary was contested last week by a Labour-led parliamentary committee, which concluded that the two were "substantially equivalent". Critics have made the same point in the Netherlands, whose government opposes holding a second referendum.
The new treaty follows the old in establishing a full-time president of the European Council, which represents EU governments, to steer the EU over a two-and-a-half-year term rather than for six months as now. Although the first president is unlikely to be selected until late 2008, among early names mentioned for the job are Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, and Bertie Ahern, Jean-Claude Juncker and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, prime ministers respectively of Ireland, Luxembourg and Denmark.
The treaty also strengthens the EU's foreign policy figurehead, the so-called high representative for foreign and security policy, who will be able to draw on the resources of a new external action service that may number several thousand staff.
The duties of the high representative, currently Javier Solana of Spain, will expand because his post will merge with that of the EU's external relations commissioner, who supervises the EU's multi-billion-euro foreign aid budget. However, few doubt that foreign policy will remain strictly under the control of national governments.
This in turn threatens to ensure that a single, harmonious European foreign policy remains little more than a distant dream. One glaring example may emerge as soon as December if the Balkan province of Kosovo declares independence from Serbia. Should the US recognise Kosovo, many EU countries are likely to follow suit. But some will do so with misgivings, while Cyprus, Greece and possibly two or three others will refuse to go along.
Other changes carried over from the constitutional treaty concern a reduction in the European Commission's size from 2014 and greater influence for national parliaments over EU legislation. Under a new voting system, decisions will require the support of a minimum of 55 per cent of member states - that is, 15 out of 27 - that at the same time represent 65 per cent of the EU's population.
At an EU summit in June, Poland secured the right to delay the introduction of the voting system until 2017. This week, the Poles have made several new demands. One is to insert a mechanism for postponing EU votes for three months, or even longer, into the treaty's legally binding text.
Poland wants this measure partly because its conservative government fears finding itself in a minority on sensitive issues of national sovereignty. But some diplomats caution that Poland's demand may backfire, because the mechanism will make it easier for Germany, as the EU's biggest state, to delay votes that Poland may want taken quickly.
Another Polish demand is to increase the number of senior officials, known as advocates-general, at the European Court of Justice, so that the EU's central and eastern European member states gain proper representation in the EU court.
In contrast to the weeks before the June summit in Brussels, Poland's government has taken care not to offend Germany and other EU countries with abusive nationalistic rhetoric. With a Polish general election taking place on Sunday, other EU countries accept that Poland will have to be offered some concessions.
If this makes a deal in Lisbon more likely, countries with a fervent belief in closer EU integration, such as Belgium and Italy, nevertheless dislike the opt-outs from parts of the treaty won by Poland and, even more so, the UK. "This treaty has Britain written all over it," says one exasperated official.
The mishmash of opt-outs and compromises contained in the treaty shows how the bargain that underpinned the EU's evolution over the past 20 to 25 years may now be obsolete. Under the old pragmatic arrangements, countries that wanted an ever more united Europe created the euro, set up a zone of passport-free travel across much of the EU and pushed the case for closer co-operation on foreign policy and judicial and home affairs.
Those less keen on the "abstract ideal" of European unity won the argument for expanding the EU into a bloc of at least 28 members (Croatia is expected to join in the next few years).
In the view of some leaders, notably Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, this two-track approach no longer works, because it fails to provide clear-cut answers to the burning questions of the day. Where, geographically speaking, does the EU end? And what will the EU look like and do, 20 to 30 years from now?
Mr Sarkozy wants the December summit to set up a "committee of wise men" to address such long-term questions. Other leaders suspect that his motives are less high-minded and that he simply wants to obtain a recommendation from the "wise men" that Turkey should never join the EU. That would clash with the EU's position that Turkey is a candidate for membership.
Diplomats say Mr Sarkozy will get his committee but other countries will seek to neutralise it. "They'll say, 'Here's your Jeep, put your wise men in it, drive to the swamp and have a nice day'," one envoy predicts.
As the friction over the "wise men" proposal indicates, a successful Lisbon summit and the smooth ratification next year of the reform treaty will not by themselves guarantee a tension-free future for the EU. But the formal end of a difficult and debilitating phase of EU history is now in sight. For better or worse, the new battles are around the corner.
