The eu member states stand before some big developments. Within the next four years up to ten applicant states are hoping to join the EU. At the same time US policy-makers are turning their attention away from Europe; there are increasingly delicate relations with Turkey and Russia; organised crime is spilling over into western Europe from Ukraine and Belarus; and there are migrants struggling to enter the EU from weak and corrupt states in Africa and the middle east. This is the context for the debate about the long-term objectives of European integration as the EU becomes the core of a continent-wide political and economic order.
The next intergovernmental conference does not take place until 2004. But the communiqu? agreed after the exhausting Nice summit in December proposed four themes for governments to debate in the run-up to the European Council at Laeken this December, where the Belgian presidency hopes to publish a "Declaration on the future of the European Union." These cover the delimitation of powers between the EU and national governments, "reflecting the principle of subsidiarity," a simplification of the treaties "with a view to making them clearer and better understood without changing their meaning," a review of the role of national parliaments "in the European architecture" and the status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, proclaimed as a declaration without legal force at Nice. These are, in effect, the leftovers of Nice, not the key issues in reshaping the EU-let alone in defining the future of the wider Europe. And as so often in the history of west European integration, governments find it easier to discuss procedures rather than policies, to talk about the construction of a European constitution rather than what purposes and policies that constitution should serve.
Nevertheless, the debate which has now been vigorously launched within Germany does open the door to a broader debate on the relationship between policies, political interests and institutions-provided that political leaders can get beyond the confines of this post-Nice agenda.
The idea that 15 governments with divergent traditions can agree on a "catalogue of competences" which will allocate specific areas of policy to different levels of government may appeal to constitutional lawyers, but it is utterly unrealistic. The allocation of competences is itself part of the unavoidable and permanent battleground within any multi-level system. After the Maastricht treaty had incorporated the idea of "subsidiarity" into the EU system, the British and French governments each drew up lists of policies to be returned from Brussels to national control-with the British for example wanting to leave animal welfare issues at the EU level while returning social welfare issues to the nation state, and the French proposing exactly the opposite. This debate cannot simply be closed by declaring a final constitutional arrangement. Battles over states' rights versus federal pre-emption have been the stuff of American politics for a century or more. The Irish government negotiated a deliberately obscure protocol to the Maastricht treaty in order to prevent its constitutional ban on abortion from being over-ridden by the EU.
A glance at the Gerhard Schr?der SPD policy paper published in May suggests that an open discussion of the current acquis and the future allocation of competences leads directly on to wider issues. The SPD now wants to return agricultural support from exclusive EU control to joint financing between states and the commission. This is anathema for President Chirac, but no longer unthinkable for others within France. Driven by pressure from German state governments, the Schr?der paper also wishes to limit the extension of EU authority over educational and cultural questions where the commission repeatedly proposes grand European initiatives, (and where the European Court has laid down rules on university fees and access which are more centralist than those within the US). Alongside this it proposes tighter harmonisation of taxation to protect against competition from lower-tax states, and a substantial transfer of policing powers and criminal legislation to EU level, as well as a strengthening of EU authority over foreign policy.
These, of course, represent German interests and fears projected on to the EU. But it is up to others to respond by pressing forward their own preferred agendas, similarly wrapped in the language of shared interests and European solidarity. Foreign policy, internal security and border control are major issues for a larger EU, even though German fears over floods of Poles travelling to work in Germany seem exaggerated. Priorities in economic policy have to be discussed within the context of a single currency area, with room for vigorous argument about the appropriate balance between competition, open markets and political and social regulation.
Silence from Paris reflects both the disagreement between the Gaullist president and the Socialist government about how to respond and the embarrassment at having so decisively lost France's assumed prerogative of defining the Community's agenda. Silence from London reflects a lack of political imagination within the Labour government, unwilling to offend its right-wing press in order to educate its public and engage in constructive discussion with its partners. Tony Blair did address some of these questions in Warsaw last autumn, floating proposals to bring together national parliamentarians into a second chamber of the European Parliament which were studiously vague. Both London and Paris nervously await the beginning of the Belgian presidency in July, fearing that Belgian political leaders will make enthusiastic speeches about transferring more powers to European institutions in Brussels from the disintegrating Belgian state.
The EU-and the states of the wider Europe which surround it-deserves better than this. Twelve years after the cold war ended, the future of Europe lies in the hands of the governments which constitute the EU. The EU's current approach to enlargement is ungenerous, risking resentment among new members after entry. Relations with Russia cannot be managed without a more coherent structure for foreign policy in Brussels, and a common budget oriented less towards agriculture and more towards external relations. South-eastern Europe is in effect becoming a European protectorate, a long-term commitment of people and of financial transfers leading up to EU membership in perhaps 15-20 years. The EU itself requires reform of some long-established policies, as well as more efficient and effective institutions. Relations with the US will require delicate handling, balancing real disagreements on global policies against the necessity of maintaining a close and mutually confident partnership.
The SPD policy paper has raised the debate a little above the narrow procedural questions set out at Nice. The denunciation it has attracted not only in Britain and France, but also in Denmark and Sweden, demonstrate the difficulty of addressing underlying issues in all of those countries. The ideas that the Germans have floated, from Joschka Fischer's speech last year to Schr?der's latest paper, invite a more constructive answer. The best way to avoid this Europe-wide debate becoming bogged down in constitutional tangles is to raise the broader questions which lie behind it. What are the underlying objectives of European integration after the cold war? What changes does the EU need-in policies and spending as well as in procedures-to make a success of enlargement? What instruments does it need to build a secure and prosperous region within and around its expanding borders, as the US progressively disengages from the European continent?
