Essential Steps for the European Union after the 'No' Votes in France, the Netherlands & Ireland
This Policy Brief outlines a number of steps that need to be taken to make the EU more comprehensible and acceptable to all its peoples – and not only the peoples of France, the Netherlands and Ireland. In the authors’ view, among these steps, three in particular are indispensable: Council discussions must be made public, Commissioners must make a much greater effort to explain EU policies, and one Commissioner for each member state must be permanently assured. In combination, these measures will hopefully address the widespread mistrust that has prevented the EU from having the support it needs to move ahead. The authors are both former senior officials of the EU. John Temple Lang is a lawyer with Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP, Brussels and London; Professor, Trinity College, Dublin; and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Oxford. Eamonn Gallagher is former Director General in the European Commission and former EC Ambassador to the United Nations, New York.
The Commission, the "Community Method," and the Smaller Member States
This Article discusses several developments concerning the position of the Commission in the institutional structures of the European Union (”EU”) that have occurred since then. It does not touch on the many other matters that influenced the debate on the draft Constitutional Treaty, leading to its failure at referendum in France and the Netherlands; these matters include the scope of the draft Treaty, questions concerning its economic, social, and political benefits or disadvantages, the working of the Stability Pact in the Eurozone and the ongoing debate on freedom of services legislation, the purposes for which the EU was originally created and their modification, further enlargement of the EU, and so on. These subjects require separate treatment. THE COMMISSION, THE "COMMUNITY METHOD," AND THE SMALLER MEMBER STATES John Temple Lang* & Eamonn Gallagher* The Institute of European Affairs in Dublin published in 1995 Occasional Paper 7 by the present authors, entitled The Role of the Commission and Qualified Majority Voting, which explained that the European Commission was designed on the basis of mediation theory, specifically to provide a safeguard for the interests of minorities that might be harmed by qualified majority voting on new policy measures.' The Commission has been given various other tasks, but this is the most important one since it concerns new measures that the Member States have not previously accepted. The role of the Commission, exclusively authorized by the Rome Treaty to propose legislative measures to the Council (and now also the European Parliament), is the key feature of what has since come to be called the "Community Method." 2 This Article discusses several developments concerning the position of the Commission in the institutional structures of the European Union ("EU") that have occurred since then. It does not touch on the many other matters that influenced the debate on the draft Constitutional Treaty, leading to its failure at referendum in France and the Netherlands;3 these matters include the scope of the draft Treaty, questions concerning its economic, social, and political benefits or disadvantages, the working of the Stability Pact in the Eurozone4 and the ongoing debate on freedom of services legislation, the purposes for which the EU was * Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, Brussels and London; Professor, Trinity College, Dublin; Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Oxford. ** Former Director General in the European Commission; former EEC Ambassador to the United Nations, New York. 1. See JOHN TEMPLE LANG & EAMONN GALLAGHER, THE ROLE OF THE COMMISSION AND QUALIFIED MAJoITY VOTING 10-15 (Inst. of European Affairs, Occasional Paper No.
The institutions of the enlarged EU under the regime of the Constitutional Treaty
In this paper, we review the changes the DTC will bring about in the institutional framework of the European Union, focusing mainly, though not exclusively, on the most controversial issues, which were only resolved by the IGC at its final meeting in June 2004. Our aim is to identify and explain those changes, and to evaluate them in the light of the objectives of the Laeken Declaration of December 2001. Under the heading, "More democracy, transparency and efficiency in the European Union", three main questions were put by the authors of the Declaration: how can the legitimacy and transparency of the Union's institutions be enhanced; what should be the role of national parliaments; and how can the efficiency of decision-making, and the workings of the institutions in a Union of some 30 Member States, be improved? We offer a view as to whether the DTC provides satisfactory answers to those questions. Two other special concerns of ours are the accessibility of the text to those citizens of the Union willing to make an effort to understand it, and whether the integrity of the institutional framework has been preserved. We deal successively with changes affecting the European Parliament and national Parliaments, the European Council and its President, the Council of Ministers (as it is now to be called), the new office of Union Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Commission and the European Court of Justice. In our conclusion, we attempt an overall assessment of the institutional provisions under the new dispensation which the DTC will usher in, assuming (which we expect) that the Treaty is ratified by a sufficient number of Member States to ensure that it comes into force. To us, the provisions paint a mixed picture, with elements that may be seen as good, bad and indifferent, in the light of the criteria identified in our introduction - though with the positive having a very distinct edge over the negative.