House of Commons - European Scrutiny

Select Committee on European Scrutiny Seventeenth Report

SEVENTEENTH REPORT

The European Scrutiny Committee has agreed to the following Report:—

THE 2000 INTER-GOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCE

PART I

BACKGROUND

1. To some observers — and, indeed, some key players — it must seem that the European Union is in a state of perpetual reform. The current Inter-Governmental Conference ("IGC")[8] is the third such conference in 10 years. However, a number of issues remain unresolved from previous IGCs, and an additional urgency has arisen from the need to prepare the European Union for the accession of up to 13 more States[9].

2. This is quantitatively and qualitatively different from any previous enlargement of the European Union. The membership of the Union will, within a comparatively short period, both almost double in size and become significantly more heterogeneous. Through our normal scrutiny work and our responsibility more generally to keep the House informed on developments of importance to the European Union[10], we have been close observers of the enlargement process. We have visited several of the applicant states[11] and frequently meet delegations of Ministers, Parliamentarians and officials from these countries. We strongly support the principle of enlargement and, during our contacts, have been keen to discuss the progress being made and difficulties that may arise. These contacts have left us with the impression that there are growing concerns in the candidate countries that the EU will not be ready for their accession even when they have fulfilled all the criteria required of them. This concern springs partly from a fear that not all Member States are equally enthusiastic about enlargement[12], and partly from a perception that it will prove very difficult to achieve consensus among Member States on adjusting EU structures to an enlarged Union.

3. The need for this IGC to prepare the Union for enlargement is one of the key criteria on which we have judged the proposals for EU reform outlined in this Report.

4. Other Committees in both Houses also have an interest in the IGC. Our counterpart in the House of Lords, the Select Committee on the European Union, is in the course of an inquiry into the IGC, and one of its Sub-Committees has inquired into the related question of the proposed Charter of Fundamental Human Rights[13]. In this House, the Foreign Affairs Committee has begun an inquiry into the IGC.

5. We have made use of a variety of sources of information during the course of our inquiry. We took oral evidence either at Westminster or in Brussels from the Minister for Europe (Keith Vaz MP), Commissioner Barnier (who has responsibility within the Commission for the IGC process), Commissioner Kinnock (on internal reform of the Commission), Judge PJG Kapteyn of the European Court of Justice, Richard Corbett MEP and Giorgios Dimitrakopoulos MEP, and Mr Richard Plender, QC. During our visit to Brussels in December we held discussions with M. Pierre de Boissieu, Deputy Secretary-General of the Council; and Johannes Voggenhuber MEP and Timothy Kirkhope MEP. We also had discussions with the Portuguese Minister for Europe, Mr Seixas da Costa, when he visited London, and with other Portuguese Ministers and officials in Lisbon, in March. Mr Andrew Duff MEP and Mr Richard Corbett MEP sent papers to us, which we publish with this Report[14]. But the bulk of the written information which we have used derives from formal documents of the various European Community institutions[15] or other papers published by these institutions on the Internet. As these documents are in the public domain, we have not published them here, but they are listed in Annex A to this Report. To anyone interested in further reading, we commend the relevant websites[16], several of which have copious, frequently-updated information.

Procedural requirements

6. Article 48 of the Treaty on the European Union (the "TEU") prescribes the procedure for its own amendment and that of the Treaties founding the three European Communities. The process is begun by any Member State or the Commission submitting proposals for Treaty amendments; the Council then consults the European Parliament (the "EP") and, where appropriate, the Commission. If the Council delivers an opinion in favour of convening an IGC, the Presidency then does so. The current IGC was convened on 14 February 2000 following favourable opinions from the Council[17], the EP[18] and the Commission[19].

History

7. For nearly 30 years from its inception in 1957, the European Economic Community (as it then was) managed with only modest Treaty amendments; those consequential on successive accessions (first the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark, then Greece, followed by Spain and Portugal) and such (effectively technical) institutional adjustments as the fusion of the separate institutions of the three Communities to form a single institutional structure. Since then, there have been three IGCs which produced Treaties of substantial importance in furthering European integration:

(a) the Single European Act 1987 which provided for the adoption of measures needed to establish the internal market by qualified majority voting ("QMV") in co-operation with the European Parliament and for political co-operation in the sphere of foreign policy;

(b) the Treaty on European Union 1992 which established the inter-governmental pillars dealing with justice and home affairs and a common foreign and security policy respectively[

the Amsterdam Treaty 1997

Thus, if the current IGC is brought to a successful conclusion, there will have been four substantial revisions of the founding Treaties within 14 years.

8. In order to understand the genesis of the current IGC, one has to look back to the previous one. The end of the Cold War in the first half of the 1990s opened up the possibility of further EU enlargement; not only to such neutral States as Austria, Finland and Sweden, but even to such former members of Comecon as Poland and Hungary. That prospect generated a debate on the theme of widening or deepening. For a number of European leaders, the dilemma was that widening the EU would dilute it; and the conclusion was that reform of the European institutions had to precede entry of the new Member States.

9. The Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty), intended by some of its promoters to put in place a political union of equal weight to economic and monetary union, disappointed that constituency — in particular, collective action in the fields of internal and external security was to be intergovernmental, using the Community's institutional structure, but not its classic methods: the Commission's right of initiative and jurisdiction of the ECJ. To compensate for these "tentative moves in the area of political union"[21], the Treaty provided that an IGC should be convened in 1996 to consider what Treaty amendment would be required to ensure the effectiveness of the mechanisms and institutions of the Community[22].

10. Thus, as the final report of the Reflection Group[23] submitted on 5 December 1995 made clear, one of the three main areas of the work of the IGC to be convened in 1996 was:

Some of the specific matters to be considered were:

(ii) a possible extension of the number of areas in which the European Parliament acts in "co-decision" with the other arm of the legislative authority of the Union, namely the Council of Ministers;

(iii) the possibility of extending the explicit competence of the Union to act in the areas of energy, tourism and civil protection;

(iv) consideration of the nature of the legislative instruments of the Union (the so-called "hierarchy of norms")[25].

11. In the event, the Amsterdam European Council of 16-17 June 1997, which concluded that IGC, failed to reach agreement on any of the major institutional questions. But it did identify the issues, and specified the essential elements of a future deal, in a Protocol on the institutions with the prospect of enlargement of the European Union. Furthermore, a declaration by Belgium, Italy and France on that protocol added to the agenda a significant extension of recourse to QMV.

12. The Protocol provides for one Commissioner per Member State at the date of entry into force of the first enlargement of the Union, provided that the votes in the Council have been re-weighted, either by a system of dual majority (which means that a qualified majority would require both a prescribed proportion of votes, and the support of a prescribed percentage of the total population of the Union) or by allocating more votes to larger Member States in QMV. The Protocol also provides for a comprehensive review of the provisions of the Treaties on the composition and functioning of the institutions of the EU at least one year before its membership exceeds twenty.

Cardiff European Council

13. The high watermark for protagonists of an "ambitious" IGC agenda is found in the conclusions of the Cardiff European Council held on 15 and 16 June 1998. This added to the institutional reform agenda the topic of bringing the EU closer to the people by, amongst other things, enhancing democratic legitimacy and making a reality of subsidiarity. That latter element reflected a joint letter from Chancellor Kohl and President Chirac which called for a discussion on the implementation of the subsidiarity principle —

"in order to achieve a clearer demarkation of authority as between the European Union and Member States"[

14. It was agreed to hold an informal meeting of the Heads of State or Government and the President of the Commission under the Austrian Presidency to deepen their discussion of these matters; that meeting, held at Pörtschach on 24 and 25 October 1998, which had been expected to clarify what was meant by these notions, did not in fact do so as participants' attention was diverted to, and largely taken up by, questions of the European Union's defence policy. We return to that topic in paragraphs 146 to 150 below. On the original topic of the meeting, the future of Europe, the assembled Heads of State and Government managed broad agreement on the importance of subsidiarity but took matters no further[27].

Cologne European Council

15. The decisive moment in the preparatory phase of the 2000 IGC was the Cologne European Council on 3 and 4 June 1999, which reached agreement on both the timetable and preparatory procedures for the IGC as well as on the agenda.

16. Instead of a Committee of personal representatives of foreign ministers (which had prepared the Amsterdam IGC) or the appointment of a "committee of wise men", the European Council invited the incoming Finnish Presidency to draw up, for discussion at its meeting in Helsinki in December 1999, a comprehensive report on the options for resolving the matters on the agenda. It agreed that the conference itself would be convened in early 2000 and expected it to complete its work by the end of that year.

17. On the agenda itself, the Cologne European Council abandoned more radical proposals for constitutional amendment, such as the references in the conclusions of the Cardiff European Council to making a reality of subsidiarity. It agreed an agenda limited to the Amsterdam triangle, that is to say:-

(a) the size and composition of the Commission;

(b) the weighting of votes in the Council; and

Other amendments to the Treaties would be discussed only if related to those issues, or found necessary to implement the Treaty of Amsterdam.

8 An Intergovernmental Conference is a negotiation between the Governments of the Member States of the European Union with a view to agreement on a Treaty amending the founding Treaties. Back

9 The 13 are: Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Turkey. The formal candidacy of all these countries has been accepted. The potential interest of other countries (such as Croatia) in applying for membership of the EU has been acknowledged at a political level, but they are not yet formal candidate countries. Back

10 Our Standing Order requires us not only to report our "opinion on the legal and political importance of each [European Union] document" but also to "consider any issue arising upon any such document or group of documents, or related matters": Standing Order No.143(1). Back

11 We visited Hungary and Slovenia in June 1998, and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in June 1999. We hope to visit other applicant States when appropriate opportunities arise. Back

12 Obvious problems to be addressed are whether new Member States should benefit fully from the support mechanisms under the Common Agricultural Policy and the Structural and Cohesion Funds; how this could be financed; and whether it would mean less funding for existing Member States. Back