By David
Heathcoat-Amory
(Filed: 18/06/2003)
We sit in the vast hemicycle
in the European Parliament building in
Brussels. This is the last full
meeting of the Convention on the Future
of Europe. Our president, Valiry
Giscard d'Estaing, has declared a
"consensus" on the draft European
Constitution. Giscard's speech is
followed by a rather crackly version of
Beethoven's Ninth, relayed over
the loudspeakers. Then it is champagne all
round and much mutual
backslapping. A new state is being born, and I leave as
quickly as
possible.
Fifteen months ago, we started out differently.
Our instructions were to
design a simpler, more democratic Europe, "closer to
its citizens". We
certainly failed on simplification. The draft constitution
on my desk
runs to 224 pages, but there was never any real effort to
streamline the
EU, reform its bureaucracy or cut the 97,000 pages of
accumulated laws
and regulations known as the acquis
communautaire.
Instead, the convention became a forum for institutional
bargaining.
Each of the existing EU bodies jostled for more power. And
they
succeeded. There is to be a full-time European President, elected
by
heads of government for a renewable two-and-a-half-year term.
The
European Parliament gets full law-making powers, shared equally with
the
Council of Ministers. More than 30 policy areas have been moved
from
national vetoes to qualified majority voting - a dramatic reduction
in
the powers of governments and parliaments to block unwelcome
proposals.
The biggest winner is probably the European Commission, which
gets
general executive and enforcement powers. The EU's new foreign
minister
will be a member of the commission. The commission president will
be
elected by the European Parliament.
In fact, the EU will be
top-heavy with presidents, all trying to
out-president each other. A late
change last week brought in another
one: the euro zone countries are to elect
their own president to
represent them. This Europe of Presidents will do
nothing to bring the
EU closer to its citizens.
No one in the
convention doubts the scale of the undertaking or the huge
implications for
the way Europe is governed - except, apparently, the
British Government,
which is completely isolated in maintaining that the
new constitution is just
a "tidying-up exercise". In the convention,
this caused bafflement and then
some hilarity. Peter Hain, the
government representative, belatedly declared
a number of "red lines" on
proposals that he wants removed, such as majority
voting on foreign
policy, social security harmonisation, and interference in
criminal
justice procedures. But if these issues are so important to
the
Government, how can it just be a "tidying-up exercise"?
The truth
is that the European Constitution founds a new union, with a
single unified
structure and legal personality. The existing structure,
which secures the
rights of member states to make their own decisions
and collective
arrangements about foreign policy and criminal justice
matters, will
disappear. The EU will have "exclusive competence" over
trade, competition
rules, common commercial policy, fisheries
conservation and the signing of
all international agreements.
Most other policy areas will be "shared",
including transport, energy,
social policy, the environment, consumer
protection, criminal justice
and policing, and "economic, social and
territorial cohesion". "Shared"
is defined to mean that, when the EU decides
to legislate in these
areas, member states are forbidden to.
The EU's
proposed criminal justice powers are particularly striking
because they allow
for harmonisation of national laws and procedures by
majority voting. This
obviously goes to the heart of domestic policy,
particularly for a country
such as Britain with a distinctive common law
tradition, including jury
trials, habeas corpus and rules of evidence
that differ from those in most
other EU countries.
Government promises are being overturned. When the
Charter of
Fundamental Rights was agreed by the Government in 2000, the
Prime
Minister assured the Commons that it was a political document only,
and
there was no question of it being made legally binding. It is
now
included as Part Two of the Constitution, fully legally binding
under
the European Court of Justice.
The Government is now trying to
ensure the charter is applied more
sparingly by insisting "due regard" be
given to some accompanying
"explanations". Other convention members were open
in their view that
this was a contrivance to help the Government through its
embarrassing
U-turn at home.
Foreign policy, which is at present
decided between national
governments, will change completely. The new foreign
minister will
"conduct the Union's foreign policy". There is provision for
majority
voting on policies recommended by the foreign minister.
The
commission acquires a general duty "to ensure the application of
the
constitution", backed up by the Court of Justice. To put the
matter
beyond doubt, it is asserted that "the Constitution . shall have
primacy
over the laws of the member states". The draft constitution will now
go
to the European Summit in Thessalonika, and then to
an
Inter-Governmental Conference in Rome later this year.
The
Government has a list of "red lines", and it will succeed on some,
perhaps
most. But it is the nature of such negotiations that other
positions have to
be surrendered. Meanwhile, the essential structure of
the constitution will
remain, uncontested by the Government.
Those who have argued passionately
for this constitution and those who
have struggled against it can at least
unite in recognising its scale
and importance. It must be decided by a vote
of the people as a whole.
Most other member states are planning to hold
referendums next year.
If the Government is sure that the outcome will be
good for Britain, let
it have the confidence to put its arguments to the
people. After all, it
was supposed to be all about democracy and creating a
Europe "closer to
its citizens".
David Heathcoat-Amory MP, the Tory
party representative on the
convention, is the author of The European
Constitution and what it means
for Britain, published today by the Centre for
Policy Studies (#7.50),
57 Tufton Street, London SW1P 3QL