Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

Pyrrhic victory for EU at Brussels summit

Vaiju Naravane

European leaders have clearly chosen obfuscation over clarity and the new “reform” treaty is a jumble of protocols, footnotes, and addenda that only technocrats in Brussels can decipher.

Since the rejection of the European Constitutional Treaty by Dutch and French voters in 2005, the European Union was gridlocked. So European leaders met at a summit in Brussels on June 22 and 23 this year to hammer out a new “reform treaty” that would replace the outmoded and unworkable Treaty of Nice.

After intense and wearying discussions that came close to breakdown on more than one occasion, European leaders, thanks mainly to the efforts of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Luxemburg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, snatched victory from the jaws of defeat to reach agreement over a reform treaty in the early hours of June 23.

But it was a pyrrhic victory. The document that emerged from Brussels appeared to reject the ideals of a strong and unified European Union as envisioned by statesmen like Francois Mitterrand or Helmut Kohl and was instead a watered down, dismembered, and completely illegible version of the defunct EU constitutional project.

European leaders clearly chose obfuscation over clarity and the new “reform” treaty is a jumble of protocols, footnotes, and addenda that only technocrats in Brussels will be able to decipher. If the objective of this new treaty was to simplify the basic institutions, tenets, rules and regulations governing the European Union in order to make them clearer, transparent, and more workable for EU citizens, then this exercise has indeed been a failure.

The Nice Treaty came into existence in December 2000 when the French held the rotating EU presidency at a time when France was living through a period of “co-habitation.” Conservative President Jacques Chirac and his Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin were at loggerheads and the outcome of the summit in Nice was a botched treaty, badly cobbled together, that artificially preserved Franco-German parity in voting rights while according a disproportionately high number of votes to Poland and Spain. Thus Spain and Poland with populations of about 39 million inhabitants each received 27 votes under the Nice Treaty. Germany, which has 82 million voters, was given 29 votes while France, Britain, and Italy, with populations of around 60 million, were also accorded 29 votes each.

The European Convention that worked on the European Constitution (rejected in 2005 by France and The Netherlands but ratified by 18 of the EU’s 27 member states) proposed a system of double majority under which any decisions will require the support of at least 55 per cent of member states representing at least 65 per cent of the EU’s citizens. Poland’s Kaczynski twins claimed that the double majority system favoured large nations and proposed their own “square root” method to calculate the number of votes each country would have. They made voting rights a “do or die” issue and held out till the very end, brandishing their veto. Chancellor Merkel hit upon a face-saving formula for the hyper-sensitive Poles that allowed the summit to be salvaged. The double majority will now go into effect from 2014 instead of 2009 and will be phased in over three years.

Leaders like the Kaczynski twins, Britain’s Tony Blair, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, and Dutch Premier Jan Peter Balkenende all needed to take something back home to sell to their electorates. The twins had made the voting system a “do or die” issue. Mr. Blair could not give the impression that British foreign policy had been made subservient to that of Europe. Mr. Sarkozy had indulged in a lot of sabre rattling about “protecting” European champions against hostile takeovers and “social dumping” practised by emerging nations such as India or China. Mr. Balkenende could not allow the EU parliament to take primacy over local legislation. EU leaders and technocrats cunningly retained most of the features of the defunct EU treaty, thus giving the impression of change while actually making very little of it. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the famous Italian writer of The Leopard put it: everything must change so that nothing changes.

The French objected to the clause in the initial Treaty on “undistorted competition.” This was cut out of the main text but added in an accompanying protocol. The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which was unacceptable to the British, no longer figures in the main text. But bingo, there it is in a separate protocol. The primacy of European law over national legislation, anathema to many, has been expunged from the main treaty but retained elsewhere. The thought of having a “foreign minister” for Europe gave the Brits the shivers. The title was therefore dropped but Javier Solana will continue to function as the EU’s de facto Foreign Minister.

What the Treaty truly rejected was the use of the term constitution, all reference to symbols such as flags or an anthem for the EU, and the declaration that the euro is the currency of the Union.

President Sarkozy irritated a number of his European counterparts by claiming the idea of a European mini reform treaty as his own. Particularly annoyed were the Germans who claim the idea was first floated by Chancellor Merkel who worked quietly towards this end during the six months that Germany held the EU presidency. “Without our groundwork under the Chancellor’s direction, this mini treaty would never have come about. True that he was present during the tough negotiations with Poland and that he and Merkel played Good Cop, Bad Cop. But to claim that everything was his own idea is simply not honest,” a diplomat in Brussels told this correspondent. Mr. Sarkozy hailed the reform treaty as “an unmitigated success” — mainly for himself.

Other more “pro-European” leaders did not hesitate to express their dismay at the paucity of what emerged from Brussels. “It’s a discounted agreement. I am happy that this compromise will allow us to get out of the impasse in which we found ourselves, but as a pro-European I feel embittered to have witnessed such a spectacle,” said Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi who has also served as the President of the EU Commission.

“A number of people came to Brussels with the intention of putting a brake on the European process and they got what they wanted. But the European ‘spirit’ has taken a step back and this will inevitably lead to a two-speed EU. I have never seen such explicit and programmed Euro-scepticism at work. We have had differences in the past but at this particular summit each minor point under discussion took on the proportions of doctrinal proclamations,” Mr. Prodi said in a recent interview.

Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht said: “The main aim and virtue of the rejected Constitutional Treaty was clarity and transparency. The aim of this treaty appears to be illegibility and confusion. This treaty is nothing but a collection of footnotes.”

Mr. Sarkozy’s insistence on expunging the clause calling for “undistorted competition” elicited a few caustic comments from his peers. Giuliano Amato, Italy’s Interior Minister and former vice president of the Convention that proposed the discredited and now dead Constitution, said its cancellation was “absurd” and that with its clear calls for protectionism, it would “humiliate and discourage” partisans of free trade.

Several leaders have pointed out that the new reform treaty is not guaranteed success. Leaders have said that the new treaty once formally drafted need not be subjected to referenda but could be adopted by a simple vote in national parliaments. But the EU could be playing with fire over this too, since demands for the holding of referenda are growing in several countries. In Holland, the current governing coalition of socialists and right wing populists has already begun calling for a new referendum.

Federalists such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit who leads the Green in the European parliament said: “This text will not allow Europe to speak with one voice. What guarantee do we have that Gordon Brown or the Polish twins will not go back on their word since they have given a sorry demonstration of this in the past? Let me remind you that Britain had agreed to the Fundamental Rights charter!”

Indeed Poland has already begun to backtrack. Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said Poland received assurances at the summit that once new voting rules took effect — in 2017 at the latest — small groups of countries would be able to block any EU decision for two years, a tool Warsaw views as key to maintaining its influence over EU decision-making. But the other 26 countries said their understanding was that decisions could only be blocked for several months under the new deal. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said it was “inconceivable” that negotiations on the contentious elements of the EU’s new treaty should be reopened during the Inter Governmental Conference (IGC) to hammer out final details of the text.

The Portuguese, who have now taken over the EU’s six-month rotating Presidency, will produce the first detailed draft of the new reform treaty for the launch of the IGC on July 23. They hope a deal can be done by October, and signed formally in December. But there are genuine worries that the irascible Poles who nearly made talks collapse will attempt to pick fresh holes in the deal. And this is not counting other contentious issues such as Turkey, the future of Kosovo, economic governance, tax harmonisation, social protection, foreign and military cooperation or climate change.

The prediction by Mr. Prodi of a two-speed Europe could well become a reality with some countries developing their own joint military structures and regional budgets. What could be imagined is a group of some 10 countries moving ahead with their involvement in the euro, Schengen, and key common policies while a varying set of countries remains on the periphery. Europe clearly has a rough ride ahead.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Forced by circumstances
Affordable housing for all
Pyrrhic victory for EU at Brussels summit
Canada flexes muscles in scramble for the Arctic
Corrections and clarifications
Operation Silence
Education & conscience
History makes sense

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu