What is the role of Europe ?

The first task of the Convention on the Future of Europe will be to answer the question ‘What is the role of Europe?’. It is now fifty years since work began on the construction of Europe in the very specific context of the aftermath of the world war and at a time when Cold War tension was at its highest. In the meantime the scars of war have been healed. The Soviet Union has disappeared, and the entire continent has been liberated from Communism. The six founding nations have been joined by nine others, and the whole of Eastern Europe is now knocking on the door of a union which was commercial, then economic, then monetary and which now aspires to become fully political. What tasks should be entrusted to the united Europe, and what policies should remain a matter for national governments? In order to prepare the ground for the deliberations of the Convention, the European Parliament asked me to compile a report. The conclusions I reached in that report were adopted on 16 May by 71% of the MEPs who were present in the House. It was a significant result.

In fact, the debate itself was a ‘first’. Since the conclusion of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, neither the European governments nor the European institutions had ever seen fit to review the distribution of roles within the Community.

The final adopted text, moreover, is the fruit of a genuine collective effort which goes far beyond the person of its author or the opinion of any political group. It took account of 170 amendments from about thirty different Members representing every political group.

We did not seek to rewrite the treaties but to establish guidelines for the essential rewriting process on the basis of some bold political choices.

The fact is that the treaties in their present form were drafted by diplomats for their own use, which is rather like a car being built by mechanics and only for mechanics. The first aim is to make the draft accessible to all the people of Europe. This means rewriting the treaties to mould them into a proper constitution of the European Union by making their provisions clearer, more concise and more coherent than they are at the present time.

The general framework for the division of powers would be based on three categories:

– Fundamental competence lies with the Member States. It is not proposed that the exclusive powers of the Member States be listed. The enshrinement of this fundamental competence seemed to us to convey a more powerful message: competence lies with the Member States unless the constitution states otherwise.

– The Union has powers of its own. In these areas it can act alone (customs, currency) or exercise primary responsibility (the internal market, competition and cohesion policies, for example).

– Lastly, there are shared powers. This will be by far the longer list. The constitution will have to specify on a case-by-case basis the purpose and scope of action to be taken by the Union, applying what is known as the subsidiarity principle, in other words the principle that decisions are taken as close as possible to the people. The way in which traditional forms of hunting are to be organised, for example, will not be a matter for Brussels to determine.

On this occasion, two very important areas of responsibility would be transferred to the European level: primary responsibility for foreign and defence policy on the one hand and for the fight against large-scale crime on the other. In these two key areas, ten years of tentative probing have confirmed that concerted action is absolutely imperative and, alas, that current procedures are ineffective: they depend on the goodwill of the fifteen governments and are constantly undermined by the objections of one or other of them. One need look no further than the extradition of suspected terrorists: France refused to extradite a member of the Italian Red Brigade, the UK would not extradite a French Islamist, and Belgium and Portugal turned down extradition requests in respect of Spanish members of ETA. And what about the inconsistencies in the various national asylum and immigration policies? Surely the abolition of customs controls between our countries compels us to adopt and pursue common policies.

Finally, there was another ‘first’, in that the European Parliament held a lengthy debate on the problem of regions and other territorial units within Member States. In all of our countries, these play a vital role in the administration of Community policies and especially of the Structural Funds. Moreover, seven of the fifteen Member States have regions with legislative powers, which encounter conflicts of authority with the Union. For this reason I proposed that the future constitution of Europe recognise the existence of ‘partner regions of the Union’. Parliament did not go as far as that. At least the final compromise text called on Member States to make proposals for fuller involvement of their regional and local authorities in the activity of the Union.

The Convention now has its first waybill. The only regrettable thing is the persistent silence of French national leaders and our media on this essential debate, which is being reported on television and in the press in neighbouring countries. All of the candidates in the presidential election acknowledged, whether with regret or gratification, that Europe had now become the natural framework for the establishment of broad guidelines in the fields of economic and foreign policy. Nevertheless, all of them, with the notable exception of François Bayrou, disregarded this in their programmes. This contradiction was one of the targets of the protest votes that caused such an upset on 21 April.

Alain Lamassoure, 22 May 2002.