Examination of Witnesses (Questions 97
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 8 DECEMBER 1999
MR RICHARD
CORBETT AND
MR GIORGIOS
DIMITRAKOPOULOS
Chairman
97. Gentlemen, welcome. This is a great opportunity
for us to come along and meet with yourselves as part of our inquiry
into the IGC. I would like to thank you both for coming along
and I am sure we will have a fruitful and informative exchange.
Can the ambitious proposals recommended by the Parliament be adequately
and comprehensively dealt with within the proposed timescale starting
with the launch of the IGC in March 2000 and completion in December
2000?
(Mr Corbett) I would say yes, why not?
If you look at the previous Inter-Governmental Conferences, I
believe the Single European Act Inter-Governmental Conference
lasted three months. The Maastricht Inter-Governmental Conference
lasted a year and that was producing a far bigger set of Treaty
amendments than is likely to come out of this Inter-Governmental
Conference. The Amsterdam Inter-Governmental Conference was the
exception lasting a year and a half, but that was because everyone
was waiting for the British General Election and it was kept going
until after the British General Election had taken place. For
the new Inter-Governmental Conference, if you look at the agenda
items, if it is restricted to the so-called three Amsterdam leftovers,
those are issues which are extraordinarily well known to the national
governments. They looked at them during the Amsterdam negotiations
and they do not need much studying, they need a political deal.
It is a question of a day or a night in a European Council meeting.
That means we have almost a whole year ahead of us in which there
would be ample opportunity to explore some other issues.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) Even if we go beyond the so-called
Amsterdam leftovers we still have two more issues to deal with.
One would be foreign and defence policy and the other one would
be the future of the economics (?). Again, if there is enough
thought and discussion between governments the work could be completed
within one year.
Ms Jones
98. I would like to turn to the proposed Charter
of Rights. What sort of status are you thinking of for this Charter?
Are you thinking of it as a "proclamation" or are you
considering something with legal force?
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think within the European Parliament
there is already a majority leading to a Charter which would be
of a binding nature. We have looked into different texts and the
existing texts on fundamental rights. I think there is the majority
saying that we would like this Charter to be of a binding nature.
In fact, we have tried to link the Charter with the proceedings
of the IGC. In the Report that I was honoured to be one of the
co-authors of there are at least two paragraphs that speak of
the importance of the Charter.
(Mr Corbett) Even if the minimalist option is taken
with regard to the Charter so that it is simply a restatement
of existing rights, not creating any new legal rights, there is
still a case for putting it in the Treaty up-front, at the beginning,
in a visible way. One could imagine, for instance, early in the
Treaty an Article saying, "EU citizens enjoy the following
rights: Part (a) the rights laid down in the European Convention
of Human Rights of the Council of Europe enforced through that
mechanism; Part (b) the following rights that are to be found
in the EU Treaties, (ie: nondiscrimination on the grounds of nationality
and the other rights that are scattered throughout the Treaties
at the moment) and Part (c) whatever is then adopted under Article
13." Such an approach would be in order to make it more visible.
It could still be incorporated in the Treaty even if the minimalist
view is maintained.
Whether the minimalist view is maintained when
you have created this extraordinary machinery involving national
and European parliamentarians, government representatives, etcetera
in a sort of ad hoc assembly simply to draft a restatement
of existing rights that most of us round this table could do in
a day's work, remains to be seen. I think that the process will
gain a momentum and a dynamic of its own, but how far it will
take us remains to be seen.
99. If you are thinking of writing this into
the Treaty, whether it is minimalist or of a more binding nature,
do you not think this is going to lead to some confusion given
we already have the ECHR to which all members of the EU are already
bound?
(Mr Corbett) That is a question that should have been
addressed when they decided to draft this Charter in the first
place. One of the items that will be discussed will be whether
or not it is adequate to leave things as they are and perhaps
have a reference to the existing Conventions in the Treaties.
Another issue which will be raised again is whether the EU or
the EC should adhere as such to the European Convention. All that
will be discussed by the Charter body.
100. I think you are right, I think those questions
are quite important. Perhaps they should have been asked earlier.
You are saying they are still being asked and that the debate
is open as to whether we still need all this, is that right?
(Mr Corbett) I think the debate is still open, but
even if the conclusion was reached that we are happy with the
European Convention and the various rights in the European Union
Treaties already, there is still a case for writing that in the
revised Treaty itself up-front and in a visible way so that citizens
can say "Oh, yes, as European citizens we have rights laid
down partly here, partly there and they are visible in one place".
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think I would also agree that
the debate is still open, but I think we have an important task
and that is to see—and the Charter of Fundamental Rights
is a very very good example, but it is not only limited to the
question of fundamental rights in the European Union. We have
a number of texts on various issues that need to be re-examined
or qualified and I think the existence of the European Convention
on Human Rights should not be seen as something contrary to the
Charter. There are two things that ought to be considered because
what we are looking at doing is producing something that would
be more up to date and something that would meet a number of new
challenges that are ahead of us as we enter a new century.
101. I thought it very interesting when you
said that this is for the benefit of European Union citizens.
Would you say that if this Charter goes ahead it might be one
way of making the European Union more intelligible to the citizens
of the European Union? Is that part of the exercise?
(Mr Corbett) Yes.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) Yes.
Mr Dobbin
102. This question is in two parts and it is
about the separation of the text of the European Union Treaty.
Why should the European Union Treaty be separated into two parts,
with one short part containing the principles and institutional
arrangements, and a longer part setting out the common policies?
Further to that, why did the European Parliament reject the idea
of different revision procedures for the Treaty if it was divided
into two texts?
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) First of all, I think that the
division of the new Treaty into two texts is part of the process
of thinking to present the Treaties in a more rationalised way,
a more qualified way so as to be better understood by European
citizens, which has not exactly been the case with previous Treaties.
The question of the revision of these parts, in fact the question
of the revision of the Treaties I feel needs to be further discussed
and the discussion does not apply simply to the revision method,
but it applies as to the subject lines that will fall under each
of the two parts. To give you an example, the Cohesion Fund, is
all discussion around the Cohesion Fund to be considered policy
or is it part of the fundamental provision of the Treaty? These
are issues that in some Member States are still being discussed
and, therefore, we felt that we should permit this discussion
to continue in order to come out with a conclusion. However, I
think that at the end, the link between the revision procedure
with each of the two parts is going to be inevitable.
(Mr Corbett) I think that I addressed this issue in
the written evidence I submitted to you where I said that there
is a case, even if you did not have two revision procedures, to
rewrite the Treaties in this way to make them clearer and more
understandable. It is not just a question of the wider public,
but even experts and journalists who have been based in Brussels
for a dozen years or more often have great difficulty in finding
their way around the Treaties which are the basic texts of the
European Union, so there is a case to reorganise the Treaties
in any case. The controversy really is more about whether the
second part, the small print, if you like, could be amendable
by a simplified procedure. That is controversial because you would
in effect be asking national parliaments, yourselves, to ratify
a Treaty where you would be allowing further amendment of at least
part of that Treaty to take place without further reference to
yourselves. That is not without precedent though. There are a
number of protocols to the Treaties, some of the EMU protocols,
for instance, which can be changed by the Council acting unanimously.
There are provisions in the ECSC Treaty which allow amendments
which need to be approved by the European Parliament. There are
various Euratom Articles, I gather, (though I have not looked
into that one I must confess) with a simplified procedure, so
it is not without precedent. I think perhaps for some of
the technical details and the real small-print stuff, that might
be less controversial an idea than to say that the whole
of the second part of the Treaty might be amendable by simplified
procedure, which I think is unlikely to meet with approval in
any of the national parliaments.
Mr Connarty
103. Can I turn to qualified majority voting
which is an issue I notice in section 19 of the Dimitrakopoulos/Leinen
Report. It says very simply that qualified majority voting and
co-decision should be the fundamental method of general legislative
Community-level decision-making. In your own evidence you have
given us a lot of arguments and put some meat on the bones about
how the process might work, so the Constitutional Affairs Committee
clearly supports a further extension. Are there any issues you
would wish to exclude and for which you would retain unanimity
because you seem to argue that there is no problem that cannot
be solved by the consensus method?
(Mr Corbett) First, may I congratulate you on your
pronunciation of the Dimitrakopoulos/Leinen Report!
104. I have many good friends in the Greek and
Greek Cypriot community.
(Mr Corbett) Most of us in the European Parliament
just call it the "George and Joe Report"! To change
anything from unanimity to qualified majority voting itself requires
unanimity and although most of the Member States are saying in
the run-up to these negotiations, "Yes, we must move to QMV
in a far wider area", they all have exceptions. If you put
the list of exceptions next to each other, I think you will hardly
find a Treaty Article that does not have at least one Member State
saying, "No, we cannot move to QMV in that area", so
it is not going to be easy to have any shift towards QMV unless
we make a powerful case for that. That is why at this stage I
am very hesitant to add my own list of exceptions to where I think
unanimity should be kept. Obviously the strongest case for keeping
unanimity is in the fundamental, the Treaty itself, but one immediately
gets on to the case of, for instance, enlargement. That is an
area where Member States say, "Oh yes, you must have unanimity
to approve any accession Treaty", but if you think that through
a bit, are we really going to say that the first wave of Central
and Eastern European countries can come in and perhaps block the
next set? Could, for instance, and let's hope that this will be
hypothetical, but could Hungary come in and then veto Romania
because at that particular moment in time there may be a dispute
about the status of the Hungarian-speaking minority in Romania?
It is not inconceivable that that sort of problem would arise
somewhere or another, so perhaps we should at least write the
Treaty in such a way that new countries coming in cannot block
the next one in the list just because it got in there a year earlier.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think that the most difficult
thing when you are talking about the extension of qualified majority
voting is to see what kind of interpretation we give to the list,
as it was explained by Mr Corbett, what some Member States, my
own included, call highly important or highly national interests,
and the question is, "What is the definition and to what
extent or what are the areas that important matters of national
interest cover?" I think the case in point, enlargement,
is quite important and it is there maybe, enlargement, that we
have to take as a point of departure in the sense that the enlargement
as a process, when it comes to its end, even if it is for the
first set and not twelve applicants, falls in the two parts. The
accession by itself is a fundamental, very important act because
it changes the structure that we are giving it. It is an addition.
It alters its frontiers. On the other hand, the mere fact that
membership entitles States to participate in policies brings it
to the other part, the policy part, which, as I have said, is
at least at the moment the area where we all look when we talk
about an extension of qualified majority voting. Finally, I think
it is quite important to say that the extension of qualified majority
voting is more linked, at least in our thinking, with the improvement
of the working methods. It is very important to know that sometimes,
even in the past, for smaller, simpler issues, we would find difficulties
simply because decisions were not being taken by qualified majority
voting. Still, I think it is an important issue. I agree with
Mr Corbett that if you put down the lists of Member States, you
will end up with a very long list and, therefore, I think that
it is going to be one of the issues that we will need an exhaustive
debate on during this year to make sure that we come down with
a decision that is a majority one.
105. I am sure you are both interested to know
that Commissioner Barnier, whom we spoke to yesterday, seemed
to have a similar approach. He did seem to push out the bounds
of QMV. I noticed that Richard mentioned foreign policy declarations
and indirect taxation, for example, which are clearly sensitive
issues. What you did not mention were the areas of asylum and
immigration and what would be the new Title IV issues. Do you
mean the Constitutional Committee would be prepared to see qualified
majority voting on items that would come under Title IV of the
EC Treaty, particularly asylum and immigration matters?
(Mr Corbett) I think the short answer is yes, our
Committee would say that. Unanimity is a double-edged sword. You
may be able to cast your veto from time to time to support your
interest, but if you have a veto so does everyone else and you
are as likely to suffer from vetos cast by others blocking things
that you want or you need. It makes sense to have QMV if you are
dealing with these matters as a joint policy. If you are not,
if you are leaving it up to each Member State, fine, but if these
matters are going to be a joint policy, which is the stated intention,
then QMV would be the sensible way of dealing with it. QMV is
a very high threshold, it is well above two-thirds of the weighted
votes in the Council. It has crept up somewhat, (a point which
you must communicate to Mr Vaz because in his recent speech he
said it had been the same from the beginning). So there are some
safeguards under a QMV system.
106. Can I clarify that you are speaking here
as the spokesman for the European Socialist Party. Is that right?
(Mr Corbett) Your question just now was is this the
view of the Committee and I said I think that is the view.
107. I just wanted to be clear where the balance
of forces lie on this matter because we had evidence yesterday
that was the position of the EPP group and can you guarantee that
the group of which you are a member will take the same position.
(Mr Corbett) That would be the majority position of
the Socialist Group.
Chairman
108. That was Mr Kirkhope, the Chief Whip of
his group, assuring us they all agreed with him.
(Mr Corbett) Of his group or of his national delegation?
Chairman: The group.
Mr Connarty: You will notice we did not tell
you what position he took.
Chairman
109. We will send you the text.
(Mr Corbett) I did not say anything, I just raised
an eyebrow at the fact that his position would conform with the
majority position of the EPP group. It is far better you put that
question to my colleague.
Mr Connarty
110. I need to press you. We need to know if
that is the Committee position. Is this your individual position
in the Committee or is this one that you think is reflected in
the group?
(Mr Corbett) I think the position I just stated would
be the majority both within our Committee and within the Socialist
Group.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I would agree with what Mr Corbett
said. I think the view expressed is the majority opinion in the
Constitutional Affairs Committee. As far as the EPP group is concerned,
I found what you said very very interesting. What I can say is
that maybe the EPP group will need to have more discussions after
what was said to you yesterday.
111. Does the view of the Committee hold that
all measures adopted by QMV must have a co-decision element? Maybe
you could expand on this concept of derogation which I notice
you mention in your paper, Richard, as a way of getting round
the problem where an individual country does not agree with the
decision. Is that an extension of the concept of co-decision?
(Mr Corbett) No, that was with particular regard to
common, foreign and security policy decisions. We advocate co-decision
on legislation, and CFSP is not legislation. We think that
if the matter is legislative and goes to Council it should also
go to Parliament, and, as you know, we also advocate QMV
being the normal procedure.
What I put forward in my written submission
as a derogation system is to address the difficulty of trying
to run a CFSP on the basis of unanimity with nearly 30 Member
States around the table. (It would be a bit like the OSCE, although
even they can take decisions with unanimity minus one). It would
be very difficult in day-to-day practice to have a meaningful
CFSP. It would be very lowest common denominator decision-making
and with a perpetual Sword of Damocles hanging above you so that
any individual country could say "We're blocking any decision
until this matter is dealt with or that matter is dealt with".
On the other hand, if you had QMV on foreign policy, that is a
matter which is very sensitive for Member States and at the heart
of national sovereignty. It is difficult to imagine countries
accepting to be bound by majority decision on an issue that they
feel strongly about and where they are in a minority. So what
I have put forward as a possible way out is to say let us have
QMV to adopt European Union policies, statements, etcetera, but
an individual state can then decide to opt out of that if it voted
against it. So the national sovereignty is preserved. The down
side of that is that people will question the worth of a common,
foreign and security policy if it is not common to all the Member
States. I think the reality of decision-taking would be such that
the Union would be very careful not to adopt important policy
decisions in areas where the major countries were not in agreement.
You would not send peacekeeping troops to Kosovo unless France
and Britain were in agreement, for instance. But what it would
mean is that if a country was being totally unreasonable or if,
say, Latvia wanted to block a decision on this or that there would
be a way around it and because there would be a way around it
that would tend not to happen.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think there is one point that
is important and that is the term "legislative". It
is in the Report and it was also the prominent term in all the
discussions. I think the question of foreign policy, which is
not legislative, is important and will be very important for some
Member States. Yet in that area there are already some activities,
such as decisions centred around the application of the MEDA Programme
and it is an example that I have in my mind because it brought
about a lot of discussion at European Union level when qualified
majority was adopted as a method. For example, if you look into
decision making in the context of the MEDA Programme, the decision
to block funds for certain reasons stated in the Treaties is taken
by qualified majority voting, the reason being that if, for example,
we had a problem with one country we should not have to hold hostage
the rest that may be meeting the criteria. Therefore, the principle
that comes out of this is to try to find ways where within the
law you could still have a way out which would make the European
Union more balanced.
Mr Marshall
112. Could I just go back, I do not want to
pursue the common foreign security policy at this moment in time,
but just go back to qualified majority voting and co-decision-making.
The point was made to us yesterday by an official, not by a politician,
that if by necessity the extension of qualified majority voting
was accompanied by co-decision making, the claim was made that
it could begin to clog up the parliamentary procedure within the
European Parliament. I forget the number of examples that were
quoted, but if one thinks of the British House of Commons, if
30 pieces of legislation were to go through per year, that is
a big, heavy year, and the point was made to us that even at this
particular point in time, the numbers going through the European
Parliament are substantially higher than that and that if the
extension was made, it would lead to greater delays in legislation
being passed. Firstly, do you accept that that is likely to be
important and, secondly, if it is, how should it be overcome?
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think that the point is well
taken in one way. We all understand and we are already witnessing
the increase in the load of work of the Parliament, but I do not
think that the change of the amount of work that we have to go
through is enough or is the strongest argument to modify our position
as regards the extension of co-decision. What it has to be coupled
with is of course a certain reorganisation of the works of the
Parliament and this is something that we are always addressing
even now, the way things work now, so I would think that of course
we are aware of that. Obviously with the extension of co-decision,
the amount of work and the procedures will be also increased,
but at the same time I think that it calls for a new, if you like,
improvement or change of our working procedures. It does not,
at least in my mind, form an argument to make the back-track from
the wish, if you like, to see a logical, an additional logical
extension of co-decision.
113. Could I just follow that up perhaps before
Richard comes in. I hear what you say and I accept what you say,
but it does appear that if one continues to go down this route,
then is it not true that the number of European Members of Parliament
actually involved in the decision-making processes decrease and
that one becomes more and more dependent upon a particular Member
of the European Parliament who is involved in the debate, who
has got the expertise and whom everybody else relies upon for
the advice whether or not to support or to oppose it? Does it
necessarily lead to greater democracy and greater debate or could
it actually lead to the reverse?
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think that if it is coupled
with, as I said, a revision of working methods, which is an important
issue, it guarantees further democracy because what you have just
said about the debates and the responsibilities attributed to
Members, in a certain way certain responsibilities over certain
issues or different issues, depending not only on the interests,
but also on the knowledge that each Member has, exists already.
For example, I rely a lot on colleagues that I know have a deep
knowledge of economics which I do not have and maybe they rely
on what I would say on political and on foreign policy issues.
The real question is to guarantee democracy and to be able always
to employ the term "further democracy" is to make sure
that the extension of co-decision is also coupled with a further
revision of working methods.
(Mr Corbett) You refer to the high volume of legislation
that we deal with compared to your 30 items a year, and that is
partly because we deal with a lot of technical legislation as
well, which in a national context would be dealt with by a statutory
instrument. Because the European Union is extremely democratic,
we go through a full parliamentary procedure as well which should
be looked at in the nature of an additional safeguard. It is additional
scrutiny being brought to bear on top of that which is brought
to bear by the Ministers representing their Member States in Council
who are often very busy. If it were not for the European Parliament,
the EU's decision-taking system would be, perhaps, overly dominated
by diplomats and bureaucrats loosely supervised by Ministers flying
periodically into Brussels and with you keeping an eye on your
Minister. We bring an extra little bit of scrutiny, shedding of
light on issues, bringing extra points to bear from a different
angle with the full plurality that the Parliament brings with
members of governing parties, opposition parties, from the capitals,
from the regions and so on. That being said, is it a problem,
this large volume of legislation? Well, the Parliament has just
received a study from the Institut für Europaische
Politik in Bonn by Andreas Maurer and his study shows that,
the co-decision procedure does not take longer than the consultation
procedure that applies in most other legislations. Consultation
can be very lengthy because when Parliament is only consulted,
it tends to want to negotiate a long time before giving its formal
opinion and that can be time-consuming. I would also point out
that most co-decision procedures result in agreement between Parliament
and the Council without needing recourse to the Conciliation Committee.
The two readings in each body are enough and you do not need to
go through the full length of the procedure. For all those reasons,
I think there should be no difficulty in extending co-decision
to the remaining legislative areas to which it does not apply.
It now applies to the bulk of the legislation, and the obvious
big gap is agriculture. Now, extending it to agriculture, we are
not saying that everything that comes under Article 37 of the
Treaty should be co-decision, because within that Article there
are some things, such as price fixing, which are executive by
nature and not legislative. But for the common principles for
the common organisation of the market for different products,
are of a legislative nature and there it would make sense for
it to be co-decision. It is not a very big extension of the workload
of the Parliament we are looking at in practice and it is certainly
within what we can do.
Chairman
114. There is widespread agreement that there
should be a reweighting of the votes within the Council. Do you
or does the Constitutional Affairs Committee yet have views as
to how this new weighting should be achieved?
(Mr Corbett) The Committee has been reluctant to go
into detail on that because in a sense that is a matter for the
Member States and the Council to work out a new system. I have
my own views which you have seen in the paper I circulated. I
think there is an obvious trade-off at this IGC in that the largest
five Member States will probably give up their rights to a second
Commissioner and in exchange get an extra couple of votes each
in the Council and I think that would be a reasonable and easy
way to deal with it rather than the option of having complicated
double majority systems which would be even more difficult for
the wider public to understand.
115. So it is your Committee's view, is it,
that it is against the double majority, but you do not have a
view on how you would take it?
(Mr Corbett) Not on the figures.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I would like to add, if I may,
one explanatory remark. I think there are two reasons for which
the Committee at this stage did not enter into a more detailed
proposition on this issue. The first is the proceedings of our
work in the European Parliament which have in the future at least
two more reports on the content of the Inter-Governmental Conference,
so what we were trying to do was to take the issues step by step
and at this point it was obvious and natural that we could concentrate
ourselves on the first step of the Inter-Governmental Conference
which is the agenda and the method. The second point to make here
is that these three so-called Amsterdam leftovers may look simple
and they have been discussed at Government level a lot, but they
are still not easily resolved. What we would like to do as the
European Parliament would be to offer a proposition, the objective.
Whether we are going to get close to that or not is another matter,
but the objective in my view should be to offer a proposition
so that the governments that will be in the IGC would look at
it and say, "Ah, this is something which would be worthwhile
taking", and that needs some parallel work done along with
the work of the IGC.
Mr Dobbin
116. The size and the make up of the Commission
has been an interesting part of the evidence we have taken so
far. I would be interested in your views on that. After enlargement
we could have a Commission of 25 or more members. Do you think
this would be a bit unwieldy? What should be done to ensure that
the size of the Commission does not undermine its effectiveness?
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think it is an extremely difficult
issue because the title of Commissioner is something that is very
visible, particularly in the smaller Member States that only have
one Commissioner. We all agree that enlargement by virtue of numbers
would certainly bring about a very large Commission and therefore
there we have to think about two issues, the first is numbers
and the second one is the dossier. Would it look nice and be correct
to have Commissioners floating around without having a dossier.
I can give you as an example something I tried out in my own country.
When we discussed in a local forum in Greece the question of the
number of Commissioners I dared to ask, "Are we interested
in having one Commissioner that may not have a dossier or are
we interested in looking instead at doing away with a Commissioner
and looking for two Director-Generals that are very powerful and
do all kinds of things?", and people stood up and said, "Would
you take that decision if you were a Foreign Minister participating
in the Inter-Governmental Conference?" I sat back and realised
they were right. It would be very difficult for some to come back
home and say, "I gave away one Commissioner." As I say,
it is more obvious to smaller states because bigger states who
have two would be able to work that out. It is not easy either
for the big states. I think it is very difficult. I think the
best way out would be to look for ways that are closer to the
structures of national governments and to see whether we could
come up with a scheme that would be analogous to the government
structures we have, like ministers and deputy ministers or something
like that. That could be one way out. I am not bringing this as
a definitive position on my part. At the moment I am trying to
find alternatives that would be a compromise in terms of content,
that is to say results and efficiency but also in terms of politics
because—and I really have to stress this point—for
some states it is really very difficult to accept the idea that
there will no longer be a Commissioner, even if not having a Commissioner
may mean other positions that you and I could understand are equally
important and sometimes even more important. Finally, certain
states attach importance to being represented 100 per cent equally
in all institutions because they feel—and I think I would
subscribe to that view—that the representation of the state
in all institutions in a decisive way is a further guarantee of
how things are working.
Chairman
117. Could I just say that I think this issue
will be the deciding one if we are serious about the European
Union and enlargement because none of the applicant countries
who I have spoken to has said they want to join the Union because
they want a Commissioner. At present there is a college that has
a national input from each of the Member States, but each Commissioner
seems to be independent of the state who nominated him. It has
become a place of patronage of governments back in their own country.
If we are looking at enlarging our Union to 25 or 27 and we are
going to have for each Member State a Member of the Court of Justice
and Court of Auditors then we are just building a bureaucracy
without looking at how we manage our Union, how we link in with
our citizens and we have to have a political process that people
back in the various countries can support. It is difficult to
go on the streets and on doorsteps and persuade our people that
we really need 35 or 40 Commissioners, which would double the
size of the Commission at present, just because those members
who are coming in want to say "We have a Commissioner".
There is an extra problem that I raised with the Commissioner
yesterday. We have nationalist groupings within the Union who
want to break away. In the UK there is the Scottish Nationalist
Party and the Welsh Nationalist Party in Plaid Cymru who want
to divorce themselves from the United Kingdom and still have an
independent stake within the European Union and with that they
argue that they would be entitled to Commissioners, auditors and
judges. Add to that the problems of the federal system in Germany.
We are told that in France there are even some nationalist entities
wanting to break up parts of France and then there is Spain. Unless
this Union grasps the nettle and decides that the Commission is
there for the whole of Europe and not just there as a patronage
for national governments we will never link citizens into the
political process and that is a great challenge and I hope that
nettle is grasped at this IGC.
(Mr Corbett) I think you are right to identify the
importance of the issue. As you say, Commissioners are not there
to represent their country or their government, they are supposed
to look at the overall European interest. But they do bring a
knowledge of their country and they also give the wider public
a feeling that "Oh, yes, we have got somebody there as well",
which is part of the legitimacy of the Commission. I remember
during the last IGC there was an interesting exchange at one stage
on that very issue. The French Government representative was arguing
that we should perhaps look at going below the number of States
and have, say, twelve Commissioners and he said France would be
prepared not to have a Commissioner from time to time. The Irish
representative said, "That is exactly what we are afraid
of. We want France to have a Commissioner because the next step
would be that at Council meetings, the French representative would
say, `Ah, but this is just a Commission proposal and they are
not very representative and do not know about the situation in
France'," and that would undermine the credibility and legitimacy
of Commission proposals. From a smaller State point of view, it
is very important that the Council works on the basis of Commission
proposals, proposals drafted in the interests of the whole Union,
taking account of all Member States, and we would not want
to see that undermined, so we have a rather difficult balancing
act within the Union because the other side of what was said is
right, that if the Commission becomes an assembly instead of a
compact college, it will not work, What shall we do? Well, I think
in the short run, going to one Commissioner per Member State is
the likely outcome as we move to about 20 countries. That has
been already combined with a strengthening of the powers of the
President of the Commission to reshuffle portfolios, to set down
the political guidelines of the Commission so that it is less
unwieldy. Another evolutionary trend would be to take away the
restriction on having just two Vice Presidents of the Commission.
If the Commission were able to choose. (or the President of the
Commission after consultation were able to choose), say, five
or six Vice Presidents, that would become an inner cabinet, as
it were, within the Commission and that might help reduce some
of the problems. In the long run I think we should consider moving
to fewer than one Commissioner per Member State because after
a while it gets too big and perhaps the way to do that is to fix
now in the Treaty a limit of, say, 20 or 22, Commissioners, knowing
that we will only have to address that problem further downstream,
just as the Amsterdam Treaty fixed a limit of 700 for the size
of the European Parliament, knowing that it would not have to
address the issue then, but forcing that issue to be addressed
downstream when the time came.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I think it is a very important
issue, it really is a very important issue. I think if I have
to recapitulate things, the way things are here in the Parliament,
I think we all agree, firstly, on the importance of the matter
and, secondly, on the question of efficiency which is directly
tied to the will, not simply the wish, but the will of the European
citizens that they want a European Union more efficient, more
democratic, more transparent. The question that I think needs
further discussion and elaboration, and there again we all agree,
is what is going to be the proposal, not that much for the next
five years, but for the future and what Richard Corbett said and
you said, Mr Chairman, I think is a good point of departure. As
regards the European Parliament, we already have a ceiling of
700 Members and we have it because we all know that if we go beyond
700 Members, maybe all the issues that we have already talked
about could be found with difficulty. Now, what it really means
is that we will have to reconsider the number of seats per Member
State because if we do not do so, we realise that only with the
entrance of Poland will we end up with a ceiling of 700 Members
if we apply the methods applied up to now. Therefore, I think
that the question of how we are going to structure the Commission
in the future is the one that needs further discussion and there
we already talked about, and you talked, Mr Chairman, about a
number of ideas that could bring about a proposition that again
would be long lasting because the problem is not the first five
years up to the year 2005, but it is a little longer.
Mr Dobbin
118. Just to tie this discussion up, one of
the models that has been talked about, and it is possibly under
consideration, is this issue of making sure that all Member States
have some representation, and it is this possibility of there
being a two-tier system with some smaller States having a junior
Commissioner.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) This is of course an alternative,
but I would add to this that this has to be tied with the responsibilities,
the competencies of the Commissioner and there maybe there might
be a slight problem because if you have a rotating system, then
you have to couple that with strong structures that would preserve
the continuity, and this is one of the reasons that I did not
say too much about that in the beginning, and instead I look more
into structures that are, as I said, more analogous to what you
have at the national level. We all know that one of the big arguments
at the national level is to have an efficient government. In Greece,
for example, every time we talk about a very efficient government,
there will be not very many ministers and so on and so forth,
and what happens in practice is another question, but I think
that that also is an important proposition because it guarantees
a little more, I would say, in my view, the important question
of the continuity in the dossier, in the area of responsibility
of each Commissioner.
Chairman: What I was saying is that these issues
cannot be dodged, that they have to be taken on at this IGC. I
could be persuaded to support the view of our two witnesses, that
now is the time to put a figure on the maximum of the Commission
and there is sense in that, but these nettles have to be grasped,
as the weighting of votes and qualified majority voting has to
be done before we have enlargement or we will just break down,
as I see it.
Mr Marshall
119. Could I move on to external affairs, particularly
security and defence. In the text which the Parliament adopted,
as I understand it, the Treaty reform for the next IGC, paragraph
34 calls for the integration of the WEU in accordance with a clear
timetable, thereby enabling the Union to take action on the basis
of a credible military capability. Do you not both feel that this
is now a little out of date? This was based upon the proposition
that the policies laid down in Maastricht and Amsterdam were going
to be followed, whereby we were going to have a common defence
policy and ultimately common defence with the WEU being taken
into the structures of the European Union. Is it not true that
post-Cologne that no longer is the situation and we are no longer
faced with the WEU being taken into the European Union and what
we now face is the creation within the Second Pillar of the European
Union of institutions which actually replace WEU institutions?
The governments may, if they wish, take part of the WEU, but by
no stretch of the imagination what is now being offered is the
taking into the EU of the WEU. What is the position of the European
Parliament on that? Secondly, what Treaty changes do they think
will be required to create the structures in the Second Pillar
to enable the European Union to carry out Petersburg-type tasks?
Thirdly, within the WEU we have the associate member countries,
the European NATO countries which are non-EU countries, and they
do have a formal part to play in the WEU both in the planning
and the carrying out of missions, and they value that position
highly. How will the European Union be able to take into account
the need to keep those countries on board and to ensure that we
do not create any greater instability in Europe as a consequence
of this action? Fourthly, the Western European Union has a Parliamentary
Assembly which from time to time has issued some valuable reports
and also criticised the Member governments for the lack of action
in certain areas and has been highly critical of Western European
countries over Bosnia and Kosovo in recent years so that there
is some parliamentary supervision. If the WEU as an institution
formally disappeared and that Parliamentary Assembly disappeared
that would lead to some kind of democratic deficit which cannot
be filled solely by the European Parliament. How do you suggest
we begin to address that looming democratic deficit if the Cologne
process is followed through?
(Mr Corbett) You are right that the situation is evolving
quickly, these issues are moving forward and the situation changing.
I would not say that the absorption of the WEU idea is completely
dead because we have just witnessed the appointment of the new
Secretary General of the WEU who is the same person who has already
been appointed as the High Representative for the CFSP of the
Union. That is one way in which we have already brought the WEU
and the Union structures much closer together and created an organic
link between them. I think the agenda is still open as to how
far down that road we wish to go. You might say if the Union is
developing its own capacity in these fields why keep the WEU?.
Is it not just an extra structure, less transparent for the public,
more confusing, more bureaucratic, etcetera. You gave some of
the answers, i.e. the participation in the WEU of countries who
are not full Member States of the Union and the rights that they
have obtained there. There is also the little matter of Article
5 of the WEU Treaty. Could that be absorbed into the EU Treaty?
Certainly not without derogations, I would imagine, in the current
state of play. The issue is one that should be addressed. I gather
that the intention of the Member States is to pursue these discussions
in parallel with the IGC and if the outcome of those discussions
includes anything that requires Treaty amendments then we could
sort of wrap it into the IGC process at the end. It will not initially
be dealt with in the IGC itself. The WEU Parliamentary Assembly
does valuable work, but it does not have a decision-taking role.
It has an advisory and scrutiny and cajoling role. If it were
wound up and its functions were taken over by the European Parliament
on the one hand and by the issues being addressed by COSAC on
the other hand—perhaps a special COSAC meeting once a year
or twice a year on that, I do not know—could that not plug
the gap? You could say that without the Parliamentary Assembly
there would be a lack of democratic legitimacy at least in terms
of Parliamentary scrutiny. Could the national parliaments and
the European Parliament provide that? It is not a decision-taking
role, after all.
(Mr Dimitrakopoulos) I would like to offer some thoughts,
but I must emphasise the fact that these thoughts do not yet have
the official endorsement of the group. I am telling you the position
in all honesty. The first question I think is very important and
of course the stimulus for that is the question of the WEU, but
it applies to other institutions as well. I think at the moment
we are having to discuss and address the number of institutions
that exist and their role at a European level. Nationally there
are at least two of these institutions, NATO and the OSCE, that
are not 100 per cent European, they have a transatlantic dimension,
but the WEU and the Council of Europe are 100 per cent European.
The question of the WEU falls into this general way of thinking.
Secondly, the entry or the absorption of the WEU to the European
Union is not a new question, as you know very well, it was discussed
during the previous IGC. Certainly, everyone is aware of the fact
that such a process by today's ideals could be a little bit obsolete,
as you said, because there is a lot of thinking being developed
in a fast way and it does have attached the institutional questions
that you have mentioned. The resolution of these institutional
questions is certainly linked to Treaty changes as regards that
area, but I think it is also linked to a trend that is being developed
in the European Union of creating in parallel a certain attitude
to defence as this is analysed and presented in the other two
institutions and in particular in NATO, i.e. a purely European
approach to defence and I think that this is important. It should
not be construed as an attempt to go to war with the European
plus trans-Atlantic institutions like NATO that deal with defence,
that should not be the case, although there have been moments
in other areas where we have had differences with the United States.
The necessity of having within the European Union a cellule that
would create a European defence attitude I think is important.
There are six associate members of the WEU but they are not members
of the European Union. That is a very important point because
if we take the approach that they could participate as members
in the new defence structures that will come out on the basis
of certain Treaty changes in this area then some will ask the
question, "If we've gone that far why not take another step?",
which I do not think is necessarily the best solution. I would
offer as a solution closer co-operation between the existing institutions,
NATO and the European Union. The democratic deficit as a result
of the WEU Parliamentary Assembly I think is something that can
be resolved. If we look at the relationship and the way the NATO
Parliamentary Assembly will function from now on, the European
Parliament will function from now on in the area of defence and
foreign policy and so will the national parliaments. We have come
to a point where we have a number of institutions created under
different circumstances and we have to re-address this question.
Within this thinking, the question of the WEU is of course the
first one, but at the same time I think that sometimes a formal
approach is being superseded by the thinking and ideas that are
developed, and I agree with you that in the area of defence first
and then in the area of foreign policy, lately we have witnessed
very fast developments.
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