Notre Europe's viewpoint | 28/06/2007 

The Portuguese presidency, which takes over the reins of the EU Council from Germany, is relieved. The Portuguese had considered several scenarios for an intergovernmental conference (IGC). Those of them based on a lack of political agreement at the European Council meeting of 21-22 June can now be excluded. Because agreement there was. The German presidency confirmed its talent for negotiation. The new French president, who had committed himself to finding a compromise, kept his promise. The substance of the Constitutional Treaty is preserved: an indispensable outcome if the votes of the 18 countries which ratified the treaty were to be respected. A few important gestures were made in response to the difficult situation of the French and Dutch. But let's not miss our chance to show satisfaction. For two years the engine of the EU had broken down. A failure at this meeting could have been terminal. But the engine is up and running, and now this text must be ratified if the engine is to continue running.

There are four problems, however, with this accord. It is important to point them out if we are to think seriously about the future of the EU, in the near term (during the intergovernmental conference) or further ahead. First of all, the Reform Treaty which will amend the existing treaties fails at one of the objectives of the Laeken Declaration - that of simplification. The Constitutional Treaty at least had the merit of replacing the existing treaties and making the founding texts more easily understandable for ordinary citizens. But the best is the enemy of the better: the Constitutional Treaty, criticised for its length and complexity, will be replaced by a text which amends, one more time, existing treaties, with more declarations, new protocols, and a Council voting system that even experts have trouble understanding. The outgoing Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, was not wrong when he spoke of a treaty "of footnotes". A fundamental move therefore will be to make these treaties more readable and to separate their constitutional from their legislative elements - including by means of differenciated modalities for future revision.

Secondly, the method of negotiation, at the European Council and soon at the IGC, showed one more time the limits of the diplomatic approach of revising treaties behind closed doors. Outside observers were reminded of the bitter aftertaste of the Nice European Council meeting - the feeling of having witnessed visionless horse-trading between competing national interests, and without any public debate. And it is not so much the actors around the table at Brussels - of whom many showed genuine goodwill - that we need to question, but the intergovernmental dynamic inherent to this type of negotiation. How did we so quickly forget that from the chaos of Nice came the idea of the Convention, which - despite certain weaknesses - had the great merit of bringing together parliamentarians and government representatives and of opening its debates to the public? Some will point out that this summit at least produced an agreement. But what would this agreement have been if the Council had not used the text of the Constitutional Treaty - originally produced by the Convention? What other "red lines" would the Council have had to attempt to break down? The European Union must preserve and improve the method of the Convention. The fact that the agreement reached during the night of 23 June was based mainly on the Convention's work has demonstrated its utility.

Thirdly, it is a pity that the Council seems to have abandoned the idea of a "rendez-vous clause" in order to take the time to think about the part of the treaties concerning EU policies. The third part of the Constitutional Treaty was the cause of some controversy during the referendum campaign in France. It is now necessary that any revision of this text - to take into account ambitious new objectives, or at least to keep its content up to date with the Community acquis - be the object of a public debate in some new form of convention. An enlarged Europe needs to increase the visibility of its project for the 21st century, and to demonstrate what makes this project relevant in a globalised world. Without this, the distance between the project and the citizen will only keep increasing - and not even the most creative diplomacy will be able to restart the EU's motor.

Finally, this accord does not broach the possibly problematic issue of ratification. Declaration 30 of the Constitutional Treaty's annex had addressed the question by indicating that if 4 out of 5 member states had ratified the text while others were in difficulty then the European Council might take charge of the situation. The effect of this declaration was not, it is true, revolutionary. But at the very least it established a threshold which might have conferred on the text a certain legitimacy, if not legal then political. Does the absence of a declaration of this kind indicate that this hard-won agreement will lose all value if a member state does not ratify it? What about the idea of using this 4/5 threshold to allow a group of pioneering states to put the treaty into operation? Similarly, and despite support from many quarters, no commitment has been made to specify a common ratification period for all member states. This is unfortunate. Ratification of this treaty is a unique opportunity to open up national debates, and to encourage the emergence of a European public space.