QCEA: The Future of Europe: Spiritual Values and Citizenship

I feel very honoured and pleased to have been given the opportunity to address you this morning on two of the most important topics facing Europeans today: The future enlargement of the European Union and the Convention on its future governance. I am replacing a very old friend and colleague of mine – a friend for the past 30 years – Niels Jorgen Thogersen, who, unluckily for him has not retired yet, and who found himself in difficulties with this commitment. I am happy to replace him, and I hope that my own experience, as the former EU ambassador in two Candidate Countries for accession to the EU and many years of specialisation in European Union affairs before that – 41 years to be exact – will help to bring you a flavour of what is involved, if not too much technical detail. If you want more detail, you will be able to ask questions after this presentation, and I can make a text of it available to Neville Kerry – another old friend and colleague – after the conference, either by copy or by e-mail.

You know much better than I do who you are. But I do know that Quakers are politically active, astute, that you take a responsible interest in the way society works and that your views carry weight. This is why I am glad of this chance to explain to you what is going on. You must forgive me, many of you, if what I have to say is old hat, if you are already well informed and have your own views already. For those of you who are less up to date what I have to say may well help you to keep up to date by better understanding the newspapers and politicians.

The original title of this talk was the Convention on the future of Europe but when I replaced Niles Thogersen it seemed reasonable, since I am something of a specialist on the enlargement, which was a contributory factor to the establishment of the Convention that I should talk about this, too. Enlargement is, after all, very much on the agenda, and the second Irish referendum on the Treaty of Nice today is of immediate, if not burning interest.

What is proposed is the re-unification of Europe, the ending of the artificial barrier imposed on all us by the Soviet Union, a now discredited totalitarian regime, after the end of the Second World War, for about 40 years. We have, I believe, a moral responsibility to offer these 100 million people their rightful place in the European Union. It is also very much in our interests, and theirs, both political and economic interests, that we should be integrated in the same Union. The EU is are projecting stability into an area which we were brought up to regard as enemy territory; it is projecting sustainable economic development into a region of 100 million consumers whose lives were previously regimented by command economies which did not work, and it is providing free movement of peoples to live, to establish enterprises, to work, to be sick and to retire as European citizens in any country of the Union.

But this enlargement was different from any previous. Because of the different origin and nature of the new Candidate Countries, preliminary criteria were set for the opening of negotiations on membership, and extensive preparations were made – and are still under way – to bring them into the Union properly equipped to act as full, first class members from the first day.

These conditions for membership are already long fulfilled by the current 15 Member States, including Britain. The accession process, as the governments call it using the common if somewhat florid language imposed upon us by diplomacy, is a long, intense and complicated business. If Britain had to go through all the hoops which the present Candidate Countries are now doing, we should find it a much tougher business than we did back in the sixties and early seventies when Britain joined.

First of all, the so-called acquis communautaire or body of European Community law was much smaller then; for example there was no internal market, no environment policy, no consumer protection law, no law on human rights. Britain’s chief difficulty in its 12-year struggle to join the European Community was to negotiate terms which would also preserve some access for the essential exports of Commonwealth countries. But even now, for those living in the Member States, including Britain, the accession process has important lessons, particularly in terms of implementing and enforcing EU law.

For the Candidates Countries of today, accession demands that two big requirements are met: First they must all fulfil the so-called Copenhagen Criteria, fixed at the European Council, or summit meeting, in Copenhagen in 1992. These criteria demand that the candidate country enjoys the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and the care and protection of minorities; and that it is an open market economy able to withstand the competitive pressures within the European Union AND with the capacity to fulfil the objectives of European economic and monetary policy.

Issues such as human rights and the rights of minorities were not then high on the agenda as they are today - indeed now enshrined in the Treaty of the European Union, and in the new Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms which is included in the Treaty of Nice which is what the Irish are voting about today.

For the new candidates these criteria had a much more relevant application. With the exception of Turkey, Cyprus and Malta, they had all been communist countries, wrapped in the iron embrace of the Soviet Union whose Bolshevik party supervised both their domestic and foreign policies. Even as I speak, the word Bolshevik has a far-off echo, of some dusty, smoke-stained distant past. Yet we are speaking of only 13 years ago. So the European Union has had to make sure that in offering membership to these countries, some of which had never ever experienced real democracy, or the rule of law, or human rights, that these countries would be able to demonstrate not merely that they had adopted the appearance and trappings of democracy, a proper judiciary with rights of appeal and fully applied not just to people but to the economy and business, but that they could implement and enforce those criteria, which were so new to them.

The second big requirement is that the Candidate Countries adopt the entire acquis communautaire, that is to say European Community law (which is about 86-90000 pages in English), and that they create and demonstrate the administrative capacity to complement and enforce that law. This has required all their Parliaments adopting a huge body of new law – sometimes in single laws, sometimes in great chunks of framework law with implementing law tacked on later; and the adapting or the establishment of departments and institutions across the country to administer the laws.

The candidates have to adopt the whole acquis. They may seek and negotiate for time to implement parts of it, transition periods to enable them to finance and to put in place the means to implement that part of the acquis. For example parts of environmental policy which are expensive and which take time to put in place - and the Union does not wish to impose dangerous burdens on their economies.

All this covers 31 Chapters: Let me give you some of them, to give you an idea of the scope - and let me remind you that Britain and the other Member States already fulfil these obligations, as part of their own law, on a daily basis:

There is a group of chapters under the heading of the Internal Market: The free movement of goods, including our customs union; the free movement of persons (which some Member States wanted to withhold for a transition period); the free movement of services and the free movement of capital (for which some of the Candidates want a long transition period in order not to have to put their agricultural land on the open market in case it was all bought up by their rich neighbours). There is a social Chapter which enshrines the laws on health and safety at work, and equal treatment at work for men and women.

Other Chapters include competition policy –which involves fair trading, monopolies, anti-cartel policy, the abuse of a dominant position in the market, and state aids or subsidies; agriculture which breaks down into domestic and external farming regulations and agricultural trade (which cover half of the whole acquis), veterinary and phytosanitary laws, a whole new part of the acquis called food safety which should have special resonance in the UK, and the budgetary provisions.

Then there is transport, covering road, rail, air and water transport; taxation (did we really want to make the EU so unpopular in the new Candidates by insisting they double or treble the tax on their cheap cigarettes immediately on entry?) and including the approximation of value-added tax; statistics (easy peasy for some candidates, a nightmare for others and in any case real statistics are a new essential for the candidates: the communists used to massage statistics for purely political and propaganda purposes; there is a Chapter on SME’s (in my view the development of a strong SME sector is the key to a soft landing for all these new members – they will provide the basis for most new jobs, a rising standard of living, anchoring other EU capital and high technology investment in their countries and finally providing the basis for a new, middle class consumer society which is the hard core of our democracy and which was virtually eliminated under communism.

There are Chapters on telecomms, energy, financial control, company law and a very important Chapter on Justice and Home Affairs which includes the Schengen agreement on lifting internal EU border controls (let me say right here that while Britain Ireland and Denmark opted out of Schengen there will be no opt outs for any Candidate Countries); these are border controls inside the EU, and Schengen requires the strengthening of the Union’s external borders with non-EU neighbours; Justice and Home Affairs also includes policy on immigration, visas, asylum, refugees and the fight against international crime and corruption and terrorism, with the most important latest addition to the Treaty a common European arrest warrant.

An important achievement of many candidates last year was the completion of negotiations on the Chapter on the environment, which means that, far from eastern and central Europe remaining a toxic dump which the communists had left behind them in many places, this part of the world will become as environmentally conscious, clean and safe as the European Union is required to be today. (By the way, the area of the environment was the first in some of these former communist countries where non-governmental organisations were able to campaign without being crushed by the communist regime. It is a source of amazement and distress to me that the Irish Green Movement has campaigned against the Treaty of Nice and thus to block the entire enlargement process. They are effectively campaigning against their fellow Greens in central and eastern Europe. If this happens I expect reactions in every Irish pub in eastern and central Europe!)

Together with my Delegation of 60 staff and the enlargement team in Brussels, my last job was helping Hungary to achieve all this, the adoption of the legislation and the strengthening of administrative capacity to implement and enforce it; and to explain to the Hungarian people what it was all about and why. To do all this does not come cheap. So the European Commission runs an extensive aid programme, called the Phare programme, to support the accession. Together with a fund for infrastucture I was personally responsible for the final signature to contracts worth around €300 million a year. The EU is paying about 25 per cent of the cost of accession; the Candidate Countries have to co-finance the remainder from their own, or from borrowed resources. More money is being pumped in during this last 18 months or so to close gaps and repair weaknesses in the preparation. This was not done for previous enlargements, and some of the new countries then were not fully ready.

After enlargement, this financial support will continue, but rather than using the Phare budget for pre-accession preparation, the new Member States will have access to the Union’s structural funds, the regional development fund, the social fund and the cohesion funds for the poorest members, which can offer the new Member States able to absorb it a maximum of 4 per cent of their gdp. These funds are what has helped to transform Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece into the modern economies they are today. No such preparation was made for previous Candidates. For example, it took Portugal five years to be able to absorb the maximum amount available under the structural funds. We hope the new Member States will be up to full absorption in a year or two. And these much bigger funds will help them to build the infrastructure, particularly in the fields of transport and the environment, to meet the full terms of the acquis communautaire by the end of the transition period agreed during the negotiations – usually 10 years.

The inclusion of these countries will add roughly 25-30 per cent to the existing land area and population of the EU. It will also add, for the time being, only about 7-10 per cent to our collective GDP. But before you frown and purse your lips, you will of course realise that this is where the new growth is. The EU is growing now at a very creditable 2-2.3 per cent a year. Many if not all the CCs have been growing by 5-7 per cent, and although affected by the general economic slowdown they are still growing faster than we are. In the case of Hungary they surpassed the GDP of the last days of communism by 1998; they have since increased growth to around seven per cent a year; they have reduced inflation from 20 per cent five or six years ago to seven per cent; and unemployment is around eight per cent – lower than the EU average. It will take about 20-25 years for them to reach the EU average – Budapest is already at 75 per cent of the EU average - but they are already well able to compete and to survive in the EU, as their export figures and trade demonstrate.

And they already do 75 per cent of their trade with the EU. So far as trade and investment are concerned, they are already integrated. Indeed, some nearly meet the criteria necessary for adopting the Euro, which they intend to do in 2007 (even if the UK does not join up, all the candidates want to and Britain may eventually find sterling pegged to the Danish kroner!). They are busy putting the finishing touches to new border controls – partly financed by the Phare programme – since they will be the new eastern borders of the European Union and must join the Schengen pact with the right of free movement for all within the Schengen borders, they are completing their adoption of the agricultural policy, competition policy and enforcement is working, huge waste water programmes are under way (did you know that until recently 80 per cent of the waste of Budapest went straight into the Danube?), EU food safety norms are being adopted across the whole of the territory and the European ban on discrimination of any kind, racial, religious, ethnic, on gender, or gender choice, against the disabled, will be fully in force by the end of next year.

Although there are fluctuating hesitations among some sections of the population in some countries – such as Estonia or the Czech Republic – the vast majority of the populations strongly support membership. They will have the security of belonging to a solid treaty-based supra-national organisation, with its own rule of law, defended by Nato and with sustainable growth prospects. They like both the right to remain sovereign nation-states, which many of them are enjoying for the first time in decades, if not centuries in some cases, and to participate in the European process of integration; and they like the way the European Union protects, and even enhances the rights of smaller states. And they like to do it within the Euro-Atlantic Alliance, a feeling strengthened after September 11.

Now while all this is going on, the European Union is not standing still. It is in a constant state of evolution; it always has been and it will be so for the foreseeable future. Recent referenda – on the Treaty of Union at Maastricht, on the Euro, on the Treaty of Nice - indicated in the labyrinthine eccentricities of public opinion a startling lack of information about what and how and why the European Union was doing things, and a mixture of apathy and reluctance bordering on hostility to all that in some countries, mostly and worst, but not exclusively in the United Kingdom. One of our three major political parties in Britain is virtually committed against further integration – yet it was the party which took us into the European Community and later approved the Single Market and then supported the enlargement because it thought it would weaken the European union.

No enlargement has weakened it - every enlargement has proved to be a catalyst for more evolution and integration. This time, e enlargement has been a catalyst for the establishment of the European Convention on the Future of Europe. It is not, I think, fanciful to have drawn comparisons between the Convention and the work of the constitution makers of the early United States. The Convention is examining the best way to manage decision-making in an enlarged European Union of 25 and even 30 Member States, to maintain and strengthen its coherence and cohesiveness, and above all to make it more transparent to the general public. Even in the UK, where Jack Straw recently rather courageously introduced the word constitution to describe a goal of the Convention, this goal has been accepted without hysteria or even much debate.

The Convention is broadly representative of our societies: It includes a Chairman who is Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former President of France; two deputies who are former Prime Ministers of Belgium and Italy, Dehaene and Amato; 15 representatives of government, who are usually the Ministers for Europe; two members from each of the national Parliaments; 16 members of the European Parliament, two members of the European Commission and 39 representatives of the 13 Candidate Countries (one from each government and two from each parliament), sitting as observers. And so it includes the centre-right, the centre left and the liberals. Even former communists. They sit on 10 working groups, from the issue of subsidiarity to the external relations of the Union, from economic governance to simplification, from the Charter on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms to the question of the legal personality – the multiple identity of the European Union.

Alongside the official Convention there is a forum, open to all, and available on the Internet, feeds into the Convention ideas and proposals from trades unions, academics, large, multinational and small and medium-sized businesses, and non-governmental organisations. A key question for both the forum and the convention will be to integrate or to link democratic processes, such as we already enjoy, better into the European Union.

It is worth saying here that the European Union has been a success. It has delivered the goods, often better than national governments. It may surprise you to recognise that none of the areas of dispute in Britain today, the delivery of public services such as the NHS, the railways, teaching, crime and law and order, the vexed question of public-private financing of public services – none are the concern of the European Union.

On the other hand, the areas undertaken by the EU within the framework of the classic European architecture, the so-called Community way, and I do not mean the Intergovernmental way, are delivered on time and are working and often, like trade and the environment, global in reach. The inter-governmental way, which involves cooperation rather than integration, and often ratification, often fails to work to the point of lapsing and it is these areas, such as foreign and security policy and justice and home affairs that attract most public criticism. More of this later. But the EU has in any case become too complicated, governed by four over-lapping treaties which even the experts find difficult to follow. It needs to be opened up to a more interested public gaze, simplified, clarified.

As the nineties progressed, we had three new Treaties, each overlapping the other, covering eventually 1054 pages. The results of the intergovernmental Conferences resulting in the Treaties of Amsterdam and of Nice fell short of expectations. The enlargement will make the European Union the number one economic power in the world. But it will require a stronger Europe, with a strong focus of clear, united European interest so as to reinforce, not weaken its collective strength, both internally and in its external activities. So the enlargement helped to trigger the great re-think, the readjustment – in short a reinvention of the system, a new Europe. The means of a Convention had already proved its worth in framing the new Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. Could it work on a larger plane?

The European adventure started with economic integration; first in trade, with a customs union and thus what we call Community competence – managed by the European Commission, like all areas of Community competence. If we go fast forward, we can see that economic integration included competition policy, agriculture, food safety, consumer protection, transport, energy and environmental policy, economic and social cohesion and regional policy and the adoption of the single European market in 1992, the internal market guaranteeing the freedom of movement of all goods, services, capital and people. Economic integration culminated in the introduction of the single currency, the euro, at the beginning of this year. The introduction of the euro marked the completion of the founding of Europe.

At this point, the best one can do is to refer to that great practical man of vision whose ideas led to the whole European idea, Jean Monnet, who said:

“The purpose of the Community was confined to the areas of solidarity enshrined in the Treaties, and while we always believed that those areas of solidarity would call forth others, and would gradually result in the broadest integration of human activities, I knew that their progress would halt at the boundaries where political power begins. At this point, it would be necessary to re-invent.”

Thus, whereas the founding of Europe was based on economic and social policies, the new policies introduced by the Treaty of Union at Maastricht, both in foreign and defence policy and to justice and internal security policy are at the very core of the State. They are not yet fully fitted into the Union. They are subject to inter-governmental agreement, through cooperation, not through integration, although much of what we call Justice and Home Affairs will move from being inter-governmental to become Community law from 2004.

The Convention is aimed at building a broader, coherent system around the acquis of European integration, what has been achieved so far, and the three institutions, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the European Commission.

The aim is to create a new, Basic Treaty, or Constitution, which will comprise the essentials of the European Union: There would be a constitutional section, and a section on common policies, followed by protocols and annexes. The Treaty should make clear what are the European Union’s well-defined areas of competence; what it should decide and what it should not, upholding strongly the principle of subsidiarity, that is to say which decisions should not be EU-conform, but best made locally, or regionally, or nationally and only where necessary or best at the European level. If it is agreed exactly what the EU should and should not do, this should go a long way to eliminating the constant carping at so-called Brussels interference, and reinforcing the consensus. It should no longer be arguable what the Union does – it will have been agreed afresh, for all the peoples, in consultation through the Convention with their own political parties, European politicians and civic society. All the arcane detail which has been added, or amended to the existing Treaties – all the new agricultural and food regulations, human rights, electronic law, voting procedures in the Council, and so on, all of which makes it difficult if not impossible for anyone but an expert to read, all this will be codified and arranged logically in a secondary text. Then we should all now where we stand and it should be easy to teach from this new Constitution.

The European Union should have a single identity. This will mean a merger between the European Community Treaty – the original Treaty of Rome with its largely economic rules, and the Treaty on European Union which came down from Maastricht with its two extra, inter-governmental pillars on foreign and security policy and justice and home affairs.

To meet the crying public need to feel that it knows better what is going on, that the EU feels closer to the general public, there is a strong tendency in the Convention towards more transparency, such as opening up the Council of Ministers to the media. It is astonishing that Europe has been built on 50 years of decisions behind closed doors. It is democratic. The Community way is based on the exclusive proposal of the Commission based on the general European interest and taking into account the interests of small countries and minority interests, including both sides of industry and sectoral interests [Commission consultation is very thorough]; moreover the Commission is monitored by the world’s biggest press corps, bigger than the White House press corps. The proposal is then scrutinised by the European Parliament which is directly elected in the world’s only international elections and which can modify or even veto the Commission’s proposal. It is decided upon, after negotiation and compromise among the governments by qualified majority vote in the Council of Ministers, and although each of them is properly elected to their own parliaments, they take their decisions behind closed doors. So when a government opposes, or supports, or vetoes a decision, it can hide, it can refuse to explain, it can – and often does – blame the Commission. This is seen as the biggest single obstacle to wider public understanding and support for the European integration which people enjoy, albeit often unconsciously. The lack of final transparency undermines the real democratic transparency which accompanies most of the process.

It is not only on transparency, but on a whole range of issues that the Convention has developed a sense of mission: It has moved from a listening phase, to a study phase; from the end of this month it will move into a proposal stage, and the tendency which is developing is not to offer the final Inter-Governmental conference a series of options, but a series of solutions, of firm proposals, many of which will be difficult for the governments to reject, at least without good reason.

There is one very fundamental argument at stake, which you will have been able to discern in my remarks: This is between the Community way, the classic Community architecture, and the inter-governmental way. Perhaps the great divide is not quite as stark as black and white, but it is important as governments, especially governments of big countries, seek to weaken the Commission and to take back more power for themselves.

The European Commission, you will not be surprised to learn, strongly supports the Community way, because it is democratic, more transparent and accountable. It is also effective. The inter-governmental way has proved to be messy and incomplete, based on unlegislated and unpredictable goodwill, it is done behind closed doors and it is not accountable. Often it does work, neither at the world level nor within the Union; look at the Kyoto Protocol; look at judicial cooperation inside the Union, only now getting better after 11 September. But, but, some things are not altogether suitable to the Community way, and so the Commission proposes the Community way with flexibility. The idea of so-called enhanced cooperation, with a hard core moving ahead with a new policy and others unable to stop it but able to adopt it later. You can be sure that the smaller Member States, always afraid of being pushed around by the bigger members, will support the Community way and a strong Commission as their best protection. The new Member States, after 2004, will also mostly, if not all support the Community way. Even Germany – the biggest Member State of all, supports a strong Commission.

As the Commission has put it in its own submission to the Convention, the enlargement is going to change the parameters of the way we do things. It will be essential to have at the centre of the system an organ, an institution charged with enouncing the general interest of up to 30 Member States, to assure the coherence of the measures adopted by the Member States, and which will have the means to project a global vision, to enhance the credibility and the unity of a system faced with the threats which weigh on the whole of the euro zone and the wider Europe. This role, it says, should fall on the Commission, which role needs to be reinforced. And lest this is seen as a territorial power grab by the Commission, it also proposes increasing the role of the European Parliament, and, for the first time, cooperation between the European Parliament and the national parliaments. And this is supported by the President of the Convention, Giscard d’Estaing. What we really need is a balance between the Community way, which works, and intergovernmental cooperation which can only work in certain circumstances.

So you need to follow this process to the point where it makes its proposals to the Governments next year; for it is finally the Governments which will decide. All treaty-making decisions are Inter-governmental and will remain so. The Community way was established by an Inter-governmental Conference of Six in Rome. As a follow-up, Giscard proposes a new sort of European Congress, without legislative powers which must rest with the European Parliament, to reflect and review the governance of Europe from time to time, a sort of follow-up Convention. He sees the European Union developing in 50-year cycles and it might well be better to keep the next 50 years under review, rather than bog down as we have now.

I believe we shall have a European Union which will not be a European superstate, as some Englishmen continue to predict – although less nowadays - but a union of sovereign Member States which is not a federation, but which is federal in many of its characteristics. It may well have a new name. It will probably have a more clearly defined personality as its President, who may well be elected in some way or another. And it will be able to stand properly on its own feet, to pull its weight in the world. I suggest that this has never been as important as it is now, in a world in which one super-power, however benign, cannot manage alone.

Michael LAKE

Conference materials also available:

Conference Report and Conclusions

Reports of working groups:

Democratic and spiritual values: the governance of an enlarged Europe

External relations: focus on development and trade

Foreign and security policy: focus on conflict prevention and US / Europe relations

Supporting the citizen: rights, responsibilities and social policy

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Further Information on The Future of Europe

• Briefing Papers on the Constitutional Treaty and Referenda

• Briefing Papers on the Militarisation of the EU