About the Franco-German Proposal
23.1.2003
The most important redistribution of power in Europe
since World War II is now being discussed under the
auspices of the Convention for the Future of Europe. It
will take the form of a new constitution for the
European Union, which could be adopted as early as
December this year in Rome. The goal, in accordance with
the desire of the all-European political parties, is to
make the EU a federal state, a state of nation states.
The Nice Summit has been described as a coup d'etat
by the big EU Member States. This would also be a
fitting description of the recent Franco-German proposal
on constitutional issues.
Romano Prodi's "Penelope plan", although
rejected by certain Commissioners, was the Commission's
own attempt at a coup. It has been sentenced to death by
the Franco-German paper. The redistribution of the EU's
power will not be through the "Community method",
i.e. through giving more power to a strong Commission.
Previously, it was thought that the EU would become a
federal state only by the Community method, which is why
the federalists support this way of doing things.
The Community method is essentially the power of the
civil servants, the eurocracy. However, in this kind of
supranational decision-making, the biggest loser is
national democracy. We have to ask if the EU, in
becoming the second largest federal state in the world
and potentially having 27-28 member countries, is too
big to be democratically governed. Is democracy as we
know it only possible in national states, and where
there is no supra-national decision-making?
The federalisation of the EU through the
Franco-German inter-governmental method is the new
dimension in the discussion of the future EU. The
alternative to this proposal to create the skeleton of a
new type of federal state is not the Community method,
but the democratisation of the intergovernmental method,
which is based on parliamentarianism: the right of
parliaments to exert control over their own governments.
The new federal state under discussion appears to
leave little room for military non-alignment. Germany
and France have also proposed to militarise the Union. A
request that the 5th article of the Western European
Union Treaty be written into the constitution has been
made in the Convention working group on defence.
Arguments for establishing a European Armaments or
Capabilities Agency are put forward on the grounds, also,
of increasing the independence of the EU from the US.
While Germany and France are demanding qualified
majority voting for all EU decisions, including external
relations and armament policies, and thus creating
pressure for a common defence policy, they are
destroying the political identity of non-aligned
countries. A non-aligned country can neither accept
militarisation of the Union nor the fact that this would
be written into the constitution.
A French member of the Convention, Alain Lamassoure,
along with his kindred spirits, is demanding that
countries that will not accept the new constitution be
expelled. More worryingly, the Commission´s Penelope
plan proposed the same thing. With this kind of argument,
the big players are threatening the smaller countries
who have sound legal grounds for rejecting the
constitution should they decide to do so. As things
stand, consensus is still required for the Treaty on the
European Union to be modified.
The treatment of the applicant countries can hardly
be called democratic. If a new constitution is adopted
in December 2003, those countries about to join the EU
in 2004 will not even be able to participate fully in
the inter-governmental conference that will take the
final decision.
There are other problems with the Franco-German
proposal. The proposal to elect a full-time President of
the Council and the Commission by qualified majority
would in practice - as was agreed in Nice - give Germany
and France together with some other third state a veto.
What about removing a President of the Commission? What
would happen if only one party, either the Council or
Commission, passed a vote of no confidence?
The elite of the EU are re-shaping the Union with a
new constitution. At the very minimum, each Member State
must have a referendum on the outcome. Surely also the
federalists themselves, who believe in their cause,
would wish such a legitimacy for their newly-emerging
federal state.
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