Solutions for the IGC

Written by Andrew Duff MEP and published in Financial Times Online - www.ft.com on Fri 19th Mar 2004

Chastened by the memory of the chaos in which they last met in December, the EU heads of government will meet up again next week in Brussels. They will get a report from the Irish presidency on its intensive consultations about how to bring the stalled constitutional negotiations to a successful conclusion. Let us hope for success, because a second summit failure of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) would plunge Europe into a deep crisis. No agreement on the constitution would frustrate the integration process, render the Union unable to contemplate any further enlargement and lead to a devastating loss of solidarity and legitimacy. So the stakes are high.

Facing up to the problem of the dysfunctional Council is the key to making progress. Getting the voting system right cannot be ducked. The Treaty of Nice gave Spain and Poland exceptional privileges in terms of voting weight - 27 votes to Germany's 29, despite having less than half Germany's population. This fix, which is to come into force on 1 November this year, is especially regretted by President Chirac who was responsible at Nice for sacrificing France's historic parity in the Council with Germany.

Nice also raised the threshold for achieving the qualified majority to a level at which actual decisions will be rendered statistically improbable. The problem is now understood even among heads of government. It is not efficient to set the Council unreasonable hurdles. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, will try to refocus the collective mind of his colleagues on the need to bring a European dimension to policy making by broadening the scope of qualified majority voting in the Council. He will remind them that there is really no point in having more Council decisions subject to QMV if it is too difficult to reach the qualified majority.

Mr Ahern will have also to deal with a wider fear, shared by most governments of the smaller states, that the QMV formula proposed by the Convention — half the states representing 60 per cent of the population - would allow an unholy coalition of Germany, France and the UK, acting on their own, to block any Council decision they chose. The Irish solution may be twofold: both to raise the number of states needed to form the qualified majority and to raise the number of people needed to form the blocking minority.

As Spain will still be represented by Jose Maria Aznar, no definitive IGC breakthrough can be anticipated on Thursday. But the deflation of Mr Aznar has largely solved the Spanish problem, and, encouraged by Mr Zapatero from the sidelines, the European Council will be able to decide how and when to progress the negotiations. A timely, statesmanlike intervention from Mr Chirac on Thursday evening would motivate the Irish presidency to call another IGC summit in the second half of April.

A settlement of the Council dispute will have to be balanced by a redistribution of power within other EU institutions. Given that the larger member states, including Spain and Poland, will be conceding something in the Council, surely it is right that they are able to maintain their position in the Commission? Commission decisions are taken by simple majority — even of 13 Commissioners from countries with fewer than 12 per cent of the population. The Convention proposed to limit the size of the college to 15 and sought to instill the practice of equal rotation between all nationalities. I would quietly drop the stipulation about equality. Who can honestly imagine a Commission without a Frenchman? I would also drop from the constitution any specific figure for the size of the Commission, leaving its nomination every five years to the discretion of the European Council on a proposal of the President-elect.

As with the Commission, so with the European Parliament. The draft constitution proposes that the Parliament should not exceed 736 members. That is a wholly arbitrary fix. It would be better to agree a mathematical formula that enabled the size of the assembly to respond to enlargement without becoming too large to handle. The average size of parliaments across the democratic world accords broadly with the cube root of the population. Placed in the EU constitution, the cube root rule would have the advantages of simplicity, neutrality and durability. Applying that formula to EU-25 we get an assembly of 768 MEPs. The draft constitution gives four seats to each member state. Having subtracted them, 668 seats are left to be distributed in strict proportion to national population. Such a scheme would deliver 60 seats for Poland and 64 for Spain as against 50 each agreed under the Nice formula. (France would gain 20 deputies.)

Conventional wisdom has it that a larger Parliament would be impossible to manage. But the gain in representative capability achieved by expanding the number of MEPs and allocating seats on a more proportional basis than at present offsets, in my view, the practical problems. Strong political discipline, good architecture and sound technicians can all contribute to parliamentary efficiency — as would a decision to ditch Strasbourg as the second seat of the Parliament.

Both the government and opposition in Poland insist that the last and final decisions on these matters should not be taken now. So some later verification of them will have to be written into the constitution. But in the interests of constitutionality, and of terminating these tiresome quarrels about the balance of power within the Union, the IGC must ensure that the 'rendezvous clause' is as pre-determined as possible. Why not agree that the whole package of changes will be brought into effect in 2009 unless the European Council, acting by QMV, decides to postpone the switchover for another five years? Polish honour will have been satisfied by the inclusion of such an emergency brake provision, and the constitutional settlement assured.

The terrible events last week in Madrid have hardly diminished the need for European leaders to show moral courage to shape our future together politically. The European Council at dinner on Thursday night can show the way forward.