Post - Euro politics

John Palmer [*]

Anyone who questioned whether moves to economic and monetary union would provide a fresh impulse for closer European political union should doubt no more.

The final decision in May on which eleven countries which will launch the euro next January, has given renewed momentum to attempts to give Europe the political muscle to match its economic and monetary influence.

The clearest evidence of this new mood is President Chirac's proposal to ask the former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, to head a 'wise persons' group to investigate how to advance the aim of European political unity.

This has met with sounds of alarm from Europhobes in Britain, and elsewhere, who fear Delors' tireless advocacy of European unity.

Admittedly, there are better sponsors of further European integration than President Chirac who has sometimes shown himself ready to subordinate European interests to narrow national or factional interests.

Even so, the Chirac idea has the backing not only of the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, but also of the leaders of Kohl's opposition Social Democrats, who are likely to form the next German government.

The conviction that the European Union must move forward politically and go beyond monetary union, is shared by many besides the French and German.

Take Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen, who will lead the EU Presidency in the second half of 1999. He is determined to persuade the EU to adopt the institutional reforms needed to ensure that the union can shoulder the responsibilities that go with admitting members from central and eastern Europe.

Lipponen and other EU leaders are also starting work on longer-term goals for a united Europe in the next millennium.

This is bound to influence the debate on European foreign, security and defence policy, which must deal with challenges to peace and stability - from Kosovo to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

There is growing interest in the idea that the European Parliament's political parties should put forward their own candidates for appointment in 1999 as the next President of the European Commission.

This would be a major step towards giving the Commission President a proper democratic mandate. The lack of it has too often been used by member states to weaken and discredit the Commission and its strategies.

But it will be no easy matter getting agreement on any of these contentious issues. The EU already faces a formidable agenda of political reform over the next 18 months as decisions on the budget, the Common Agricultural Policy and other key spending policies must be made.

Moreover, there is the unfinished business of EU institutional reform. Among the unresolved issues are moves to make decisions by the EU Council of Ministers on a majority vote basis rather than being subject to veto by individual national governments.

Linked to that is the pressure to distribute the votes cast by each member state in the Council in ways that more accurately reflect different population sizes. This is a move regarded with suspicion by the small countries.

At the same time there is pressure from the larger states to streamline the Commission, not only by giving its future Presidents more powers, but by reducing the number of Commissioners to less than one per member state.

The small countries will only buy these changes if, at the same time, the larger countries agree to the majority voting system that gives minor EU members some parity with bigger colleagues and neighbours.

(*.) John Palmer is Director of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think tank. For more than 20 years, he was European Editor of The Guardian newspaper, based in Brussels.

COPYRIGHT 1998 First Charlton Communications Pty Ltd.
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