A Liberal at Laeken

Written by Andrew Duff MEP and published in Hertfordshire (Herts) Mercury on Sun 16th Dec 2001

This weekend, under the palm trees in the Orangery of the King's Palace of Laeken, a suburb of Brussels, something quite extraordinary has happened. A British prime minister has declared that the European Union is a political union on the way to needing a proper constitution. A British foreign minister has criticised progress towards a common EU asylum and immigration policy as being too slow. And a British government has been instrumental in forging a common European defence policy that includes an integrated EU armed force.

All this would have been impossible without the skillful work of the Liberal-led Belgian presidency of the Council in brokering the deal, the intense impact of 11 September on the pace of European integration in the fields of internal and external security, the shock of the Irish referendum on Nice, the imminence of the launch of the real euro on 1 January and, lastly, the challenge of enlarging the Union from 15 to 25 states in two years time.

In a solemn Declaration of Laeken on the Future of the Union a new constituent method has been agreed, involving a high-level Convention (including a number of MEPs) which will be given the task of drafting proposals for a constitutional treaty. This is good news.

The Convention has been given a broad mandate to make the Union more democratic, efficient and transparent. National governments seem to be learning to be less frightened of releasing their grip on important decisions. They know it will be impossible, in the enlarged Union, to get 25 ministers to agree on everything. Majority voting and openness to the public works perfectly well for the European Parliament, and they will work just as well for the Council of ministers too. The role of the regions, like the East of England, must be reinforced if EU policy is to be better implemented on the ground. The need to respect justice, fundamental rights and good administration will be enshrined in the new basic treaty.

No EU summit meeting would be worth it without the usual tough bargaining between member states about their share of the Euro-cake. This time the arguments raged over the seats of various EU bodies and about jobs for the (mostly) boys. But there was something genuinely different about Laeken. There seems to be real agreement that the settlement of the future powers of the Union should be made by rational argument, and that, while the Union's citizens must be reassured that there is no unseemly plot to end up with a highly centralised superstate or to demolish their national identitites, it is also vital to endow the Union with a much greater capacity for action at home and abroad. Europe needs its own constitution to ensure democratic stability and legal certainty.