EU Convention on the Future: building blocks or just window-dressing?
| | RISQ Reviews | 11 February 2003 |
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Author: Ben Crum
Laying building blocks or just window-dressing? - The First Half Year of the Convention on the Future of the EU.
 Having started on the last day of February, the Convention on the Future of the EU has now finished its first half-year of work. Success of the Convention will be measured basically by two criteria. First of all, it will have to come up with innovative proposals that overcome the current deadlock on EU reform. Secondly, the Convention has to harness broad social support for the project, endowing its work with such political legitimacy. This would prevent the Intergovernmental Conference, which will draft the actual reform of the treaties, from circumventing its conclusions. Since the first half-year has been designated as 'a listening period', one should be cautious about issuing any statements about the Convention's prospects for success. Nevertheless, a work programme is emerging that provides clues on where the Convention is heading, and where it is not heading.
The most striking thing about the first half-year of the Convention has been the absence of fundamental confrontation. So far, it has been more preoccupied with keeping everyone on board than with creating substantive breakthroughs. Its meetings took off with some general debates on missions, purpose and conditions of EU action. After that, the Convention examined the two policy fields on which there is wide agreement that the Union's capacities need to be improved: the area of freedom, security and justice and external action and defence.
The Convention's work programme, as it emerges, involves three phases reflecting the chairmanship's dictum that 'tasks should define the institutions and not vice versa'. First, the Convention is to concentrate on the Union's missions. Of particular importance in this context are the working groups that have been set up for the issues of subsidiarity, legal personality and the status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. On the basis of the conclusions regarding the Union's missions, a framework of a constitutional treaty should emerge by the end of October. Then, secondly, the building blocks of this framework are to be filled in by drawing on analyses of the various policy fields: economic policies, internal security & justice, external affairs and defence & security policy. Finally, the Convention is to turn to the appropriate institutions. By the end of the year, a first overall draft of the Convention's end product should be available.
Thus the work programme effectively guarantees that only by the end of the year will the Convention begin addressing the institutional issues that have proven most salient outside its walls. Most notably in the run-up to the European Council in Seville, governments of the larger member states have floated far-reaching reforms of the organisation of the Council of Ministers and the European Council. These reforms aim at preserving the primacy of intergovernmental decision-making within the Union. On the other end of the spectrum stands the communautarian perspective, most consistently represented by the European Commission but also widely supported among the Members of the European Parliament and the smaller (Europhile) member states. This perspective basically argues that both efficacy and democratic legitimacy require that all EU affairs should ultimately be subject to the 'community method': delegating the right of initiative to the Commission, adopting qualified majority voting in the Council and fully involving the European Parliament through the co-decision method.
The Convention's Chairman Valéry Giscard d'Estaing has repeatedly warned that the Convention should not get bogged down in a political confrontation between these two grand designs. One may, however, well wonder whether the constitutional framework that the Convention now aims to lay out by early November will be solid enough to accommodate the institutional questions that are deliberately scheduled at a later stage. By organising the Convention's work programme as proposed, the chairmanship takes the risk that all the earlier agreements come to naught by the point that the concluding text requires a preference to be expressed between the intergovernmental and the communautarian vision.
Nevertheless, among the predominantly general and obligatory contributions to the Convention debates so far, some signs have appeared suggesting that the Chairmanship's strategy may actually pay off. If so, a key role in this development will have been played by Peter Hain, UK Minister of Europe representing his government on the Convention. While Germany and France are by now committed to the need for a fundamental constitutional overhaul of the European Union and other governments may be bought off with specific concessions, the United Kingdom may still consign the Convention's results to the bin as a fancy federalist daydream. Rather than quietly observing the Convention proceedings from the sidelines, Hain has chosen to infuse it with proposals that above all serve to strengthen the co-ordinating power of the Council. At the same time though he has shown himself remarkably open to addressing more federalist counterproposals. Interestingly German government representative Peter Glotz has been among the first to recognise the importance that proposals should be capable of passing the 'Hain-test' and while Glotz emphatically pursues a more federalist agenda, he ensures that his interventions leave openings to Hain. Thus, led by Hain and Glotz, the conventioneers are seeking common ground, delineating the issues of contention and exploring ways of framing them that might lead to a practical solution.
As indicated, in the end more is expected from the Convention than an artful political compromise. Still if the Convention is to succeed in securing a breakthrough beyond the stand-off between intergovernmental and communautarian visions, it will probably originate in the middle ground between Hain and Glotz (but may well be undermined if Glotz were to be replaced by a newly elected German government this autumn).
Substantive breakthroughs are required all the more given the fact that the Convention has so far achieved little on the score of harnessing broad social support. Initiatives to reach out to the wider society have taken a rather perfunctory character and have failed to reach much beyond the established European political in-crowd. National debates are slow to get off the ground and if they do they are restricted to the familiar audiences. In the civil society forum, that has been set up to serve as a sounding board, vested Brussels interests prevail. Even the Youth Convention was accused of being dominated by the Commission-sponsored European Youth Forum. After its inauguration, media attention on the Convention has been scant. According to Eurobarometer, only 28% of European citizens had even heard of the Convention in April 2002. There is little reason to assume that this figure has risen considerably since. It has been suggested that popular involvement is bound to pick up once the Convention moves to the politically salient institutional issues. By the Chairmanship's own reckoning, however, those Convention debates should be firmly conditioned by the framework set up by then.
Clearly the Convention still has a long way to go on both its success criteria: innovativeness and support. For the time being, primacy has been given to the internal debate, a clear calendar is emerging and there is a promise of fruitful exchanges. However, simply pursuing the calendar and dressing up the building blocks identified will not do. The Convention will only succeed in drawing up an attractive new house for Europe by thinking through its integral structure from the foundation upwards.
Ben Crum is Marie Curie Research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels. See www.ceps.be for more CEPS analyses.
Published on 11 February 2003 by RISQ
© Ben Crum | www.risq.org
All rights reserved.
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