Constitution: EU's next step

Submitted by webmaster 15 May 2006

Neither the French nor the Dutch governments have plans to reverse the fatal no votes, so the EU has no plan for putting the Constitution into force. While the Constitution might be re-negotiated, any new text would be unlikely to please the EU members who are pushing strongly for the current Treaty. The simple reason is that the preferences of the 10 (or 12) new members are generally less federalist, less interested in Social Europe and more pro-market than those of the average incumbent. A renegotiated text is thus unlikely to suit the pro-integration members pushing for the Constitution. Given this probably outcome, no one will sacrifice the political capital necessary to force a renegotiation. In short, the Constitutional Treaty is dead.

What is the EU's next step? No one can fully answer this question but I believe that any answer must take into account the sequence of events that led up to the Constitution - the 'trail to failure' - and the political economy logic that drove them. These political economy forces are still operating and are likely to produce a future event. To understand this future event - the EU's next step - we must dissect the problems that the Constitution was intended to redress, carefully distinguishing between urgent and obvious problems on the one hand, and less urgent and less obvious problems on the other. The urgent-and-obvious problems are things the EU must address and thus probably will in coming years.

It is impossible to allocate problems to the two categories with certainty, but the past behaviour of EU leaders provides important clues. "Revealed preference reasoning" is the jargon that economists use for this type of analysis. The idea is that one learns about people's beliefs only when hard choices are made; talk is cheap. This is especially important when it comes to the Constitution since the argumentation has been extremely woolly and has been intentionally distorted and fuzzed by many participants in the debate.

I believe the trail to failure begins with the 1993 decision on Eastern enlargement. Enlargement required the EU to undertake painful institutional reform. The EU's first two attempts at this reform - the Amsterdam Treaty and the Nice Treaty - both failed. EU leaders explicitly admitted failure the first time, but not the second time since doing so would have delayed Eastern enlargement. They did however admit their failure implicitly in the 2001 Laeken Declaration that set up the European Convention and asked it, inter alia, to propose reforms to the Nice Treaty's institutional reforms even before the Nice reforms had been tried. Moreover during the 2003 Intergovernmental Conference, EU leaders were explicitly offered the choice by the Italian Presidency of keeping the Nice Treaty voting rules, but opted instead for the hard choice of allowing the IGC to end in failure. These hard choices reveals that EU leaders - the men and women in Europe best placed to know - believed that the Nice Treaty institutional reforms would not work (especially Council of Minister voting and Commission composition).

In my view, it is not helpful to think of the Constitutional Treaty as a major step in European integration whose rejection constitutes a massive failure. In my opinion, calling the new treaty a Constitution and promoting it as a major step in European integration was primarily a matter of marketing. It was a politically convenient smoke screen that would have allowed EU leaders to fix up their Nice Treaty foul-up without admitting their error. After all, EU leaders never explicitly asked for a Constitution. In my reading of history, what Peter Norman calls the "Accidental Constitution" in his 2003 book emerged from the Convention as a politically expedient way of packaging urgent and obvious but politically painful institutional reform with enough political sweeteners to attract support of the 15 EU member states that had a veto at the time.

In 2006, Europe is faced with two sad facts. First, the marketing strategy backfired; the smoke screen was so dense that French and Dutch citizens could not see why Europe needed the Treaty. Second, EU decision making is today governed by the Nice Treaty voting rules that EU leaders rejected explicitly during IGC 2003. Even worse, the Nice rules will remain in place until a new treaty changes them.

Plainly the EU needs a new vehicle for fixing up the Nice Treaty foul-up. If history is any guide, this vehicle will have to package the urgent-and-obvious-but-politically-painful institutional reforms together with enough sweeteners to attract unanimous support from the EU25 (or 27). How can this be done? After a few years of decision-making difficulties, EU leaders will find it easier to claim that Europe still needs institutional reform. Moreover, since few of the leaders who signed off on the Nice Treaty in December 2000 will be in office, it will be easier to admit that the Nice Treaty reforms failed. One obvious source of sweeteners will be on offer when the EU undertakes it budget review in 2008 or 2009. That would be a natural time to fix up the Nice Treaty's foul up.

© Telos. Reproduction strictement interdite.