‘Reflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe …’
Opening words of the ‘Constitution for Europe’
The closing of the Convention marked only the end of Act One in what was to be a three-act drama. Act Two, just beginning, would centre on the ‘Constitutional Treaty’, to be negotiated by the member state governments. This would come to a climax with their agreement in June 2004 and its formal signing in October 2004.
Act Three would then centre on the process whereby the Treaty was ratified. Only here would a new and quite different player be called onto the stage, those anonymous millions described by the treaty as ‘the citizens of Europe’. This would be the moment of which Altiero Spinelli had dreamed six decades before, when the peoples of Europe would finally see what had been done in their name, to hail it with acclamation. In reality the outcome was to be rather different.
Giscard’s bébé
The first thing which might have struck anyone looking at the draft ‘Constitution’ Giscard was handing over to the heads of government was its length. The original US Constitution in 1787 had contained only seven articles, followed four years later by 10 further short articles constituting the Bill of Rights. Giscard’s draft totalled 465.
The first intention of the new treaty was to repeal all the existing treaties and to replace them with a new one. This was designed to ‘simplify’ and make more ‘transparent’ the existing text which, through all its amendments since the original Treaty of Rome, had expanded in an ever more ramshackle and prolix fashion. Despite this, the new draft was nearly 40 percent longer than the 338 articles it was designed to replace, and in many instances its wording even more impenetrable.
As had been more than once suggested before, Giscard proposed a ‘reorganisation’ of the treaty text. He divided it into four parts. Pride of place went to a ‘basic treaty’ of 59 articles setting out the Union’s objectives and institutional structures. This was followed in part two by the 54 articles of the new Charter of Fundamental Rights. Part three, easily the longest with 342 articles, detailed the ‘Policies and Functions of the Union’, including all the separate policy areas over which it claimed competence. The ten articles of the fourth section covered ‘Final and General Provisions’. The first of these, inserted at the last minute, gave the new Union the symbolic attributes of statehood, including its flag, anthem and motto, along with an unqualified declaration that the Union’s currency would be the euro. Finally, to commemorate the 1950 Schuman Declaration, 9 May each year should be celebrated throughout the Union as ‘Europe Day’.
Inevitably a great deal of Giscard’s text (214 articles) repeated the contents of the previous treaties, although their wording was sometimes amended, which did not always make it easy to distinguish what was new in his proposals. In an important sense, although the constitution was often discussed as if it was something quite new, it was in effect only another treaty, carrying the process of integration forward by another set of steps, just as had been done by every treaty before it. Nevertheless Giscard was undoubtedly proposing some very dramatic changes, the most important of which came under seven headings.
(1) His constitution would end the clumsy ‘three pillar’ structure set up by Maastricht. There would no longer be a distinction between the ‘European Community’, giving supranational pre-eminence to the Commission, and the ‘European Union’, run by the member states inter-governmentally, covering foreign and defence policy and ‘justice and home affairs’. Everything would now be united under one umbrella, to include all the powers, policies and concerns of the all-embracing ‘Union’.
(2) The new, greater Union would for the first time be given ‘legal personality’, as a government in its own right, enabling it to conduct almost all the normal activities of a sovereign state, including signing international treaties.
(3) For the first time it would be made explicit in a treaty that the laws of the Union enjoyed primacy over the laws of the nation states making it up. Although since 1964 this principle had been declared and upheld by the European Court of Justice, this had never before been formally enacted in a treaty.
(4) In support of all these innovations, the treaty would for the first time formally establish the European Council as a Union institution, with a President elected by the heads of government for a term of up to five years. In this respect, the principle of the presidency rotating every six months would come to an end (although the chair of the council of ministers would continue to rotate). The Union would thus have two full-time ‘super-presidents’, each serving for up to five years: the president of the European Commission and the president of the European Council. This reflected that tension between the powers of the supranational Commission and the intergovernmental Council which had become such a prominent feature of the previous few years: a tension which Giscard’s draft left unresolved.1
The tension was further reflected in his proposal that the Council should also appoint a single ‘Union Minister of Foreign Affairs’, who would serve as a vice-president of the Commission to co-ordinate and act as chief spokesman for the Union’s foreign and defence policies (supported by the Union’s own ‘foreign ministry’ and diplomatic representation across the world).
To complicate matters still further, Giscard also proposed that the Commission itself should in future be reduced in size to 15 members, thus ending the rule that every country should have at least one commissioner. This would reinforce the supranational nature of the Commission, since at any given time ten member states would have to submit to laws imposed by a body on which they were not represented.
(5) The draft proposed significant extension of the Union’s powers, to include a wide range of new objectives and competences. These would include setting up a European Defence Agency to co-ordinate defence policy, drawing up a Union space programme and developing a common energy policy. Other proposals would impose much closer co-ordination of the policies of member states, most notably in how they ran their economies.
(6) Inevitably it was proposed that there should be a further significant reduction in national vetoes, and much greater use of qualified majority voting. The old QMV threshold requiring a 73 percent majority, according to the votes given to each country at Nice, so long as these came from countries representing 62 percent of the population, would be replaced by a new formula. In future to carry a proposal would require only 50 percent of national votes, so long as these represented 60 percent of the population.
(7) Finally there was the new status accorded to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. In less than four years this had graduated from being a mere agreed statement of principles (dismissed by a British minister as having no more significance than a copy of the Sun or the Beano) to its proposed inclusion as a central ingredient in the treaty, ultimately enforceable by the European Court of Justice.
All this added up to a prescription for by far the most ambitious state of integration the ‘project’ had yet aspired to. Consistent with its character all along, the entity which would emerge from Giscard’s proposals would retain an essential ambiguity. It would have many of the attributes of a fully-fledged state, and in some respects much greater powers than those enjoyed by the federal government of the United States of America. But it would preserve enough of the outward identity of the nation states for the claim to be maintained that it was not a ‘superstate’. More subtly, it would be rather a ‘super-government’: a unique form of government which exercised much of its power through the member states’ own existing institutions.2 In this respect, the ‘constitution’ would not really provide anything like a full picture of how this system of government worked in practice, any more than previous treaties had done. This was because so much of its power and influence was exercised behind the scenes, through ‘national authorities’, the parliaments, bureaucracies and law courts of the nation states.
Not the least striking feature of Giscard’s proposals was how signally they ignored several of the chief proclaimed intentions of the Laeken Declaration, reiterated in a preface to the draft constitution itself. As eight Convention members pointed out in a minority report, the draft offered nothing to make the Union more transparent or less bureaucratic, and did nothing of substance to bring the ‘European’ institutions ‘closer to the citizens’ or to give a greater role to national parliaments.3 Despite its opening boast that it was ‘reflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe to build a common future’, there was nothing in Giscard’s draft which indicated any desire to involve citizens more closely in the system of government it sought to impose on them. There was nothing which would make the ruling institutions more genuinely accountable to the democratic will; and no proposal which would enable the peoples of Europe to dismiss or replace the governing power if they believed it had failed them. As for the claim that the constitution would give greater powers to national parliaments, Giscard offered no proposals more hollow than the convoluted formulae which would give those parliaments a slightly greater opportunity to examine proposed Union legislation in advance than they enjoyed already, under a ‘scrutiny’ system which had already so demonstrably failed; and the ‘right’, if enough of them were in agreement, to send legislative proposals back to Brussels to be reviewed, without any guarantee that the slightest notice would be taken of their views.
Nor, for all the talk of the finality of this proposed constitution, was there any indication that it would mark the end of the road. On the contrary, the inclusion of the passerelle or escalator clause, allowing further erosions of the national veto without the need for another treaty, and the inclusion of further clauses to allow ‘enhanced co-operation’ between nations which wanted to move still further down the road ahead of others (with the intention that the others should eventually catch up), clearly showed that the constitution was not to be regarded as conclusive. It was merely another landmark on the same familiar path of continuous integration, towards that distant, still undefined goal.
Yet this represented the maximum which Giscard thought at this stage it was possible to achieve. It was now up to the IGC to see whether they could agree; or whether, as he feared, they might even attempt to unravel what he had offered.
A new road to Rome
With Italy taking over the six-monthly presidency at the start of July, the baton now passed to Berlusconi. Giscard’s complete text was only handed over at a European Council in Rome on 18 July (after several weeks, frenzied work hastily cobbling together Part III). The plan was that, after a three-month pause, a brief IGC beginning in October should spend a few weeks reaching all-but-final agreement on Giscard’s proposals. In December the heads of government would then assemble in Brussels to agree the definitive text, before proceeding to the Italian capital to sign it, thus making it a new ‘Treaty of Rome’. But a portent that all might not go quite so smoothly as planned came on 2 July when the maverick Italian prime minister was addressing the Parliament. Faced with critical questioning from a senior German Socialist MEP Martin Schultz, he provoked an international furore by suggesting that his tormentor might make a good capo (commandant) in a film about a concentration camp.4
While the 25 governments withdrew to consider their formal responses to Giscard’s draft, two of Europe’s eminenti were quick to criticise it from polarically opposing viewpoints. To Prodi, the retention of national vetoes on foreign policy, defence and taxation ‘destroyed the harmony between the “big” and “little”’ states, marking a lurch back to ‘the intergovernmental method’.5 To President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, now emerging as the most outspoken Eurosceptic from the prospective member states, the draft represented ‘a visible move in only one direction … from intergovernmentalism to supranationalism’ and this ‘should be explained to the people of Europe’. 6
With the entry of the new members now only 10 months away, the Commission did at least seem on the verge of finding a partial solution to one of its thorniest problems: the need for ‘reform’ of the CAP. After almost a year of tense negotiations, Fischler had been forced heavily to dilute his original reform package. But he had rescued the central plank of his proposals: a plan to break the link between subsidies and food production, known as ‘decoupling’ (which would also meet WTO demands that the EU should stop dumping subsidised produce on the world market). Fischler’s ‘single farm payment’ would relate just to a farm’s area, conditional on the farmer being able to show that he complied with a whole range of environmental and welfare directives (known as ‘cross-compliance’). An ever larger chunk of the budget would also be moved over from direct farm subsidies into a new ‘rural development fund’ (‘modulation’). The long-term aim was that, by paying farmers simply to own land rather than for producing food, this would eventually make it politically acceptable to call for a reduction in the huge 40 percent share of the EC budget going to agriculture. But, not least thanks to French pressure, production subsidies would still remain in a number of sectors, from milk to tobacco. Meanwhile the threat posed to the budget by the need to subsidise farmers in the entrant countries would be met by capping their payments, initially at a level giving them only a quarter of the subsidies going to their Western competitors.
The Commission was also now under the shadow of its latest fraud scandal. In June the economic affairs commissioner Pedro Solbes had admitted that ‘financial iregularities’ in the running of Eurostat were worse than feared. The head of Eurostat and his deputy were relieved of their posts; and it was claimed that three other commissioners, including Kinnock, as administration commissioner tasked with eliminating fraud, had known ‘more than they have so far admitted’.7 In July Kinnock and Solbes informed the Parliament that the offices of Eurostat had been raided the previous night and its files secured. Proceedings would be taken against three Commission officials. Various Eurostat managers had been moved to ‘advisory functions’. A 20-strong inquiry team had been set up to investigate further.
A rather more far-reaching financial issue was about to re-emerge when on 14 July eurozone finance ministers met in Brussels under growing political pressure to review the Growth and Stability Pact. With France in serious breach of the budget deficit rules, Chirac was pushing for the rules to be relaxed to allow increased government spending in face of anaemic growth. Germany, wracked by strikes in favour of a cut in the working week from 38 hours to 35, supported France. Other smaller countries were appalled to see the governments in charge of the eurozone’s two largest economies showing such contempt for rules Germany in particular had insisted on. Particularly angry was Portugal, whose prime minister Jose Manuel Barroso had imposed a series of highly unpopular measures, including a rise in the sales tax, specifically to ensure that his government kept its overspending within the strict limit of 3 percent of GDP.
Meanwhile news was leaking out of a report by ‘a team of top economists appointed by the Commission’ calling for ‘a massive and urgent change’ in economic policy to head off long-term decline in Europe.8 Headed by a Belgian economist André Sapir, the group had written to Prodi, warning him that the EU had seen ‘a steady decline of the average growth rate decade after decade’ compared with the United States. It was now stagnating with a per-capita GDP at 70 percent of US levels. The group blamed the EU’s failure on an outdated model that discouraged innovation and had failed to adapt to the economic revolution of the last 30 years. The growing crisis had reached the point, the Sapir report warned, where it was ‘threatening the very process of European integration’, and could ultimately lead to the breakdown of the social contract underpinning Europe’s welfare societies.
It was against this background that, through the late summer weeks of 2003, the 25 governments meditated on their response to Giscard’s draft. In Holland polls showed 80 percent support for a referendum, the first in the country’s history. Reflecting his country’s growing disenchantment with the EU, the president of the Dutch central bank, Nout Wellink, was amongst the most forthright in calling for the Growth and Stability Pact to be properly enforced: ‘penalties are part of the system we’ve all signed up to’.9 Likewise, in Britain, pressure on Blair to hold a referendum was mounting, now backed by trade unions and 30 Labour MPs from all wings of the party, including ex-ministers. Rejecting their calls, Hain himself admitted concern over the proposal for an EU ‘Foreign Minister’, but insisted that otherwise Britain had got 99 percent of what she wanted.10
In September, as a further portent of Europe’s shifting mood, came Sweden’s referendum on the euro. On the eve of the vote, the country was stunned when the pro-euro foreign minister Anna Lindh was murdered by a lone assassin. Although active campaigning stopped, this did not affect the outcome. As opinion polls had predicted, on an abnormally high turnout of 81 percent the Swedes rejected the euro by 56 percent to 42 percent.
As if on cue, the eurozone’s economic performance now came under unprecedented attack from the International Monetary Fund. Kenneth Rogoff, the IMF’s chief economist, pointed to revised forecasts cutting the eurozone’s growth in 2003 from 1.1 percent to just 0.5, with Germany showing no growth at all. He contrasted this with the performance of the US economy, where Americans were enjoying ‘the best recovery money can buy’, coming up with the pay-off: ‘for the moment, most Europeans who want to see an economic recovery will have to watch it on TV’.11 Britain’s Gordon Brown then pitched in, accusing EU leaders of planning a ‘federal state’ with harmonised taxes which would be a recipe for economic failure. ‘The credibility of Europe is at stake,’ he declared in an article for the Wall Street Journal Europe, insisting that, if the EU economy was not to fall further behind the United States, economic reform was now an ‘urgent necessity’.
The response from Chirac and Schröder was a joint announcement that they intended to revive their economies with a huge public works programme. They outlined a 10-point list of headline projects, ranging from high-speed railway tracks and the EU’s ambitious Galileo satellite navigation programme to the provision of digital television and broadband internet links. But this would not count against their government deficits. The massive increase in spending would be financed by huge loans from the European Investment Bank and other EU agencies.
On 25 September, following a damning report over the Eurostat scandal, Prodi appeared before the Parliament to answer calls for the resignation of three of his commissioners, Kinnock, Solbes and Schreyer. ‘After careful thought’, he told the MEPs, ‘I consider there is no reason for any commissioner to resign’.12
At least there was good news for the ‘project’ from Latvia, the last entrant country to vote on joining. Another overwhelming ‘yes’ vote of 68.5 percent meant all ten were now safely in the bag. There were still some countries in Europe prepared to look on the EU with approval. But then their peoples had not yet experienced membership in practice.
The road to Rome gets rockier
On 4 October the heads of government gathered in Rome, at Mussolini’s grandiose Palazzo dei Congressi, to launch the IGC. The plan was to hold two more ‘summits’ in mid-October and December before the constitution was agreed, with a ‘conclave’ of foreign ministers in late November. Meanwhile eight working groups of diplomats and ministers would be at work behind closed doors in Brussels, thrashing out the issues still unresolved. The only head of state who refused to attend the ceremonial launch was the Czech president Klaus, who criticised Giscard’s draft as the blueprint for a European super-state, run by ‘a remote federal government in Brussels’. ‘This is crossing the Rubicon,’ he warned, ‘after which there will be no more sovereign states in Europe with fully fledged governments and parliaments which represent legitimate interests of their citizens.’13
The most obviously intractable issue was the strong objection of Spain and Poland to Giscard’s ‘double majority’ proposal for QMV, which reduced the effect of the generous voting weights they had won with such difficulty at Nice. Opposing them was Germany, demanding that her own voting power should be increased to reflect her pre-eminent population size. But, as was to become clear over the coming weeks, most countries had strong objections to one or another of Giscard’s proposals. Those planning referendums before ratifying the final text had already grown to five, with others likely to follow.
Blair, preparing for a battle over his ‘red line’ issues such as the erosion of the veto on taxation, social security and foreign policy, was looking for concessions as a trade-off. The most significant of these, which only came to light through a document leaked to Der Spiegel on the eve of the ‘summit’, was his offer of support to a Franco-German plan that the EU’s proposed defence force should be able to operate autonomously outside the Nato command structure. At a mini-summit with Chirac and Schröder, he had agreed to a joint paper which stated: ‘We are together convinced that the EU must be able to plan and conduct operations without the backing of Nato assets and Nato capability.’ The new operational headquarters would have a staff of 40 or 50 officers. The train of events started at St Malo in 1998 was now taking on tangible form.14
For weeks negotiations proceeded in the granite fortress of the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, headquarters of the Council of Ministers. As the end of November approached, with foreign ministers scheduled to meet in Naples to discuss an Italian revised draft, it was clear that divisions on many key proposals were threatening impasse.
The Spaniards and Poles were still adamant in defending their voting rights, backed by Britain in return for their support on tax. Britain and Ireland were among several countries hostile to the idea of harmonising their criminal law procedures with the general continental model. Britain was belatedly trying to weaken the proposed common energy policy, for fear of losing control of her North Sea oil and gas reserves and her ability to make bilateral deals with third countries such as Norway to secure her future energy supplies. Britain’s Treasury was allied with a bevy of finance ministers in wanting to limit the European Parliament’s planned powers over the EU budget. Britain was again allied with other countries in strongly opposing Giscard’s proposal for an ‘EU foreign minister’. With only days to go before Naples, the Foreign Office judiciously let it be known that the new treaty was ‘highly desirable but not absolutely essential’.15
At just this moment, however, another contentious issue exploded into the headlines when, after a stormy ten-hour session in Brussels lasting until dawn, France and Germany bludgeoned their fellow eurozone finance ministers into ditching the budget deficit rules of the Growth and Stability Pact. Despite the Commission’s insistence that the two big countries must be penalised for flagrantly breaching the pact, the meeting finally conceded that they should be allowed to continue breaking the rules, under a formula which rendered them all but meaningless. This example of Franco-German bullying left a sense of bitterness and betrayal in all directions. Theo Waigel, the former German finance minister who drew up the pact, declared, ‘I wasn’t disappointed, I was outraged – that Germany, which was responsible with other countries for getting the pact through, should disregard it in this way.’16 After a separate stormy session in Brussels the same day, when one of Poland’s leading ‘pro-Europeans’ complained about ‘double standards’, the German commissioner Gunther Verheugen, who had been responsible for negotiating enlargement, lashed out, ‘if this is the way Poland begins its membership in the EU, I regret my efforts for Poland’.
The previous day, at a full meeting of all the EU finance ministers, Gordon Brown had attacked Commission proposals for harmonisation of company taxation, angrily insisting that this would be devastating for Europe’s competitiveness. Backed by Ireland, France and the Netherlands, he told the Commission it would do much better to put the need to reduce harmful regulation at the top of its agenda.17 Again it was Klaus who put this issue into wider perspective. In an interview he said that the biggest challenge for his country, after living for decades under Communism, was how to avoid falling into the trap of ‘a new form of collectivism’. The enemies of a free society, he said are those ‘who want to burden us down again with layer upon layer of regulation’. The move of 25 European nations towards a single political entity would ‘not change until people start thinking and realising that they are not moving towards some kind of nirvana’. ‘You cannot have democratic accountability,’ he insisted, ‘in anything bigger than a nation state.’18
As furious recriminations continued over the breakdown of the stability pact, the EU’s foreign ministers were preparing to head for their Naples ‘conclave’ when the Italians stunned their fellow-governments by producing their revised version of Giscard’s text. It contained many more changes than expected, not least an amendment allowing the new ‘EU foreign minister’ to decide foreign policy by majority voting. This would make it all but impossible for member states to conduct independent foreign policy initiatives, such as the Iraq war. A British government spokesman witheringly commented ‘we are surprised to see this proposal, which is totally unacceptable to us in any shape or form.’ It was simply ‘loony’.19
Britain was also unhappy with other amendments, challenging Blair’s ‘red lines’ on tax, social security and the budget rebate. It did not help when Le Monde printed a leaked version of Blair’s backing, agreed that week at a secret meeting in Berlin, for a Franco-German plan to set up a defence planning headquarters outside Nato. This appeared before Blair was able to warn his friend President Bush, who was on a surprise visit to Baghdad. The Americans had already expressed fears that any autonomous EU operational command structure could threaten Nato’s survival. They would be furious to learn of Blair’s secret agreement to what was being described as ‘a European military headquarters in all but name’.20
When the foreign ministers arrived in Naples, the Dutch Europe minister Akzo Nicolai claimed it was illogical that they should be debating new rules when two leading member states, France and Germany, had just trampled over the stability pact. ‘We can’t just go on with business as usual,’ he said. ‘The impression has been given that there is one law for the big countries and another for the rest.’ The Commission, humiliated by the rejection of its attempt to impose sanctions on France and Germany, claimed this only showed it must be given stronger powers. Sole supporter of the Franco-German coup was Straw, tartly observing ‘if you have a set of rules which conflict with reality, reality usually wins’.21
The two-day meeting brought a long succession of objections to the amended text from almost every minister present, not least a heated row over the Italians’ inclusion in the preamble of a reference to Europe’s ‘Christian heritage’. The Catholic countries led by Poland and Spain were strongly in favour, more secular countries led by France equally strongly against. For once Britain remained out of it. But as the ‘conclave’ broke up, prospects for final agreement in Brussels two weeks later looked slim. Several ministers, including Straw, were now asking whether the constitution was actually necessary, claiming that ‘life will go on’ under the existing treaties.22
Debacle in Brussels
For two weeks the chancelleries of Europe were abuzz as ministers and officials worked on their final positions for the two-day Brussels ‘summit’ on 11 December. Poland and Spain were still rock solid in refusing to give way on their Nice voting rights. The smaller countries, including the Baltic states, Cyprus and Portugal were adamant that each country must retain a commissioner. The neutral states, Ireland, Sweden, Finland and Austria were refusing to sign up to the ‘mutual defence’ clause, although for Greece it was vital this should be retained. The Dutch, still smarting from the stability pact fiasco, were calling for firmer enforcement of the rule-book. Blair, having attempted to soothe President Bush over the defence deal by promising that nothing would be done to jeopardise Nato, was still sticking to his ‘red lines’. France, Germany, Belgium and Denmark thought the way out was to return to the Giscard draft. Only the Czech government was generally happy with the present version, although their president Klaus was alone in being opposed to the whole idea.23
As all this evidence piled up to suggest that agreement would be impossible, a Eurobarometer poll showed that, for the first time ever, popular support for the EU across Europe had dropped below 50 percent. In Britain it was now only 28 percent. Prodi blamed the sharp decline in approval for the ‘project’ on squabbling between national governments and the EU’s institutions.24
By day two of the Brussels ‘summit’, Saturday 12 December, Berlusconi had clearly given up any hope of a settlement. There had been only one and a half hours of formal negotiations. He allowed the gathering to spend several more hours discussing routine European Council business, including an hour-long speech from himself on economic reform, before announcing that the IGC was adjourned (he later told colleagues that he had to be away from Brussels by 11 on Sunday morning, because his football team, AC Milan, was playing in Japan).
It was the first time in history that an IGC had failed to reach its conclusion by the appointed date. While Europe’s journalists were busy setting up banner headlines such as ‘EU Summit Talks Collapse’, few heeded the two-minute discussion which immediately followed, when the heads of government formally nodded through approval for the siting of 11 new EU agencies. The parcelling out of these agency headquarters was the outcome of months of hard lobbying, because the financial benefits to the countries chosen were considerable. But much more significant was the way, though almost entirely unnoticed, this decision reflected a further huge leap forward in the way the Commission was quietly extending its powers over the life of every nation state in Europe.
The purpose of these agencies, as portended in the Commission’s ‘Governance White Paper’ two years earlier, was to provide a shadowy new supranational system of government acting through national agencies in every member state. The Commission agency, with the aid of Community legislation, would direct and dictate policy. But on the ground its role would remain largely invisible to the citizens, because the work would be done by national officials, with the added advantage that their cost would be borne by national taxpayers.
Some idea of the powers being handed over in this way could be seen by the remarkable range of the agencies whose deployment was confirmed in Brussels that afternoon. The European Aviation Safety Agency, with huge powers over Europe’s aviation industry, was to be sited in Cologne. National agencies, such as Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority, would now act entirely as its local branch offices. The European Maritime Safety Agency, with similar powers over the shipping industry, was to be in Lisbon. The European Railways Agency would be in Valenciennes, headquarters of France’s giant rail engineering company Alstom. The European Food Safety Agency, which in 2000 had taken power over all the EU’s food safety laws, would be in Parma, headquarters of Italy’s giant food empire Parmalat. Finland was to get the European Chemicals Agency, responsible for directing enforcement of the immensely costly and cumbersome ‘Reach’ system (based on a proposed directive on the ‘registration, evaluation and assessment of chemicals’ applying to every one of the hundreds of European industries using chemicals in their operations).
Vienna was to be the headquarters of the new European Human Rights Agency (formerly the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia). Britain was to get the European Police College, at Bramshill, Hampshire, to train senior policemen from across the EU in a common approach to police procedures. Eurojust, in Holland, would lead the EU-wide harmonisation of judicial procedures. Greece would get the European Network and Information Security Agency, to co-ordinate EU policy on data protection and information technology. Sweden would have the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, duplicating work already carried out on an intergovernmental basis by the World Health Organisation. And the headquarters of the European Fisheries Control Agency, set up to direct enforcement of the Common Fisheries Policy, was to be in Vigo, Spain, termed by one expert as ‘the world capital of illegal fishing’. 25
The creation of these agencies in its own way represented as much of an extension of supranational power as the proposed constitution, yet was barely reported. As for the constitution itself, responsibility for taking it forward now passed to the Irish presidency, due to start work on 1 January 2004. Ireland’s prime minister Bertie Ahern announced he would wait until March before reconvening the IGC. ‘This is a huge project,’ he said, ‘a fundamental change for the whole of Europe. It’s not unusual on such a big project that people have to reflect on it.’ 26
As usual, in the wake of the debacle, the most sceptical verdict came from President Klaus. He blamed a ‘European elite’ for the fiasco, in trying to ram through profound changes without popular consent, chiefly for reasons of ‘personal prestige’. ‘The attempt to impose a European constitution,’ he summed up, ‘was a radical step on the way to setting up a European super-state. Anyone who did not know that, knew nothing. More and more, people are becoming conscious of this danger.’27
The luck of the Irish
As the ‘ring of stars’ flag was raised over Dublin Castle in January 2004, to mark the beginning of the sixth Irish presidency, prospects for the IGC seemed bleak. The Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern bravely insisted he was ‘confident that we will have a constitution’, but could not predict when that might be.28 After admitting to ‘a couple of weeks of personal depression’ after Brussels,29 Prodi defiantly claimed that he was now ready to begin ‘fighting to salvage and restart the work of the European Convention’, suggesting that the priority should now be simply to return to the Convention’s text and approve it.30
For several weeks Ahern busied himself with seeing everyone who mattered: Prodi, Chirac, Verhofstadt, above all the leaders locked in dispute over their voting rights, Schröder, Aznar and Poland’s Miller. But all three still seemed immovable. ‘Concessions on the weighting of votes are out of the question,’ said Schroder.31 ‘We will not throw in the towel to keep quiet,’ said Miller.32
As for Blair, he was disconcerted to be told by Ahern that he must now be prepared to fight for his ‘red lines’ all over again. Blair had been insisting that Britain’s position was now accepted by everyone. But as Ireland’s Europe minister Dick Roche rubbed in, ‘in negotiations nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.’33 To win back favour, Blair pledged that he would get Britain into the single currency by 2007. In keeping with his bid the previous year to join the Franco-German ‘big two’, he had also asked to join Chirac and Schröder in Berlin on 18 February at the first of what he hoped would be regular meetings of the EU’s ‘big three’: a move which roused Italy’s foreign minister Franco Frattini to an angry warning against an emergent directoire, which ‘would be divisive and threaten European unity.’34
The mood was momentarily lightened when a leading member of Spain’s Socialist opposition, José Bono, irritated by Blair’s friendship with Aznar, broke through the miasma of diplomatic niceties to express his true opinion of the British prime minister. He was inadvertently recorded in a television studio calling Blair ‘a complete dickhead (un gilipollas integral) … an imbecile’.35 Soon events would unexpectedly bring home the political significance of what seemed at the time no more than a trivial gaffe.
January also brought two rather more serious developments. First, the Commission’s lawyers decided that the eurozone finance ministers had acted illegally in suspending the rules of the Growth and Stability Pact the previous October. Pedro Solbes, the Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, now intended to take their decision before the European Court of Justice. Then Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy spokesman, announced that Nick Witney, a senior British civil servant responsible for international security policy at the Ministry of Defence, was to set up a European Defence Agency. Its purpose would be to co-ordinate the EU’s defence planning and procurement. The significance of this was that the EU as yet had no legal authorisation to do such a thing. It was merely a proposal in the draft constitution. But to proceed with the common defence policy was now seen as so urgent that the agency must be set up even before the treaty was agreed and ratified.
In February, while positions on the constitution still seemed deadlocked, the main cause of excitement was the Franco-German-British ‘summit’ in Berlin. Spokesmen for the three countries claimed that the talks were aimed at transforming the European economy. Schröder said their goal was to help make Europe ‘the most competitive region in the world’. It was a ‘brainstorming’ session to exchange ideas and draw up joint proposals for the next European Council in March.36 The meeting nevertheless draw a barrage of criticism from the countries left out. Frattini returned to the charge by insisting ‘We want a Europe which grows with the agreement of all, not with triumvirates which damage the construction of Europe.’ 37 While Jack Straw attempted to defend the ‘trilateral summit’ by arguing that ‘if the three of us agree, Europe is likely to be more united’, a French diplomat then rather spoiled it by claiming that the triumvirate was ‘very powerful’ and ‘could perhaps even make Washington think twice, which is a very attractive idea for all three leaders’. Berlusconi declared the summit ‘a botch’, asserting that this was an opinion shared by ‘almost all’ member states.38 Spain’s foreign minister, Anna de Palacio, complained ‘nobody should be allowed to kidnap the general interest of Europe’.39 Even Kinnock weighed in, urging the ‘big three to be sensitive to the possibility of creating instability and causing alarm by meeting separately’.40
The Daily Telegraph, under the heading ‘Blair barges in on EU’s Gang of Two’, noted that the British prime minister had been publicly rebuked by Chirac, showing his unease at Blair’s intrusion into what he called the EU’s most ‘intense’ relationship.41 Chirac used a press conference mid-way through the Berlin meeting to stress the ‘specific’ importance of Franco-German co-operation. Blair said he would not apologise for teaming up with France and Germany. There was no reason for the three to be ‘defensive’ about the summit, which also involved ministers responsible for economic and social affairs. He said that between them Britain, France and Germany comprised almost half of the EU’s population and more than half of its economic output. ‘There is not any sense of exclusivity,’ he said.
In the first days of March, the general air of drift and impasse continued. Ahern was now telling everyone that work on the constitution was unlikely to resume after the European Council due later in the month. ‘I don’t think we will move to the situation of recommending an IGC unless we could make substantial more ground than we are at the moment,’ he said.42 Blair meanwhile was in Rome, still trying to reassure Berlusconi that the ‘tripartite meeting’ had no sinister undertones. ‘Let me make one thing very very clear to you,’ he told the Italian prime minister, ‘there is not, there never has been, there never will be some question of self-appointed Directoire in Europe. That’s not what we should be about.’43
The growing sense of frustration was reflected in a call from the presidents of Italy and Germany for member states to intensify their efforts to reach agreement on the constitution. In a statement issued after they had met in Rome, Carlo Ciampi and Johannes Rau said ‘time is running out. The constitution cannot fail. National interests cannot oppose common interests for a European future in peace and justice.’44 It might have seemed timely that, elsewhere in Rome, the Vatican was now being lobbied to confirm the claims to beatification of Robert Schuman, the ‘Father of Europe’, as a candidate for full sainthood.45 For this he would have to be associated with a miracle.
With only two weeks to go before Ahern was due to advise the European Council on whether there was any point to restarting the IGC, Germany offered a modest concession on voting rights, but to no avail. Spain rejected the idea out of hand. It was a ‘non-starter’.46 On 10 March, a gloomy Ahern launched consultations to salvage a deal, proposing to meet the Danish prime minister and Blair in Dublin before going on to meet Poland’s prime minister Miller. Ahern himself was leaning towards support for Germany and France in backing Giscard’s original ‘double majority’ formula.47 Then, out of the blue, came the shocking event which – if not exactly Schuman’s miracle – was to transform the story.
In the morning rush hour on 11 March, a series of bombs ripped through crowded commuter trains in Madrid. Nearly 200 people were killed, over 1,400 injured. Aznar’s government, at the end of a campaign for re-election, immediately blamed the Basque terrorist group ETA. But evidence soon pointed to an Al Q’aeda cell operating in Spain, taking vengeance for Aznar’s support for the Iraqi invasion. In a fevered eve-of-poll atmosphere, accusations of inefficiency, cover-up and even conspiracy abounded. Three days later, on 14 March, an angry and confused electorate took its own revenge on Aznar. The leader who had stood alongside Bush and Blair at the ‘Azores summit’, Blair’s closest EU ally, was unexpectedly thrown out of office.
His replacement was José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, one of whose closest Socialist colleagues was the man who weeks before had called Blair ‘un gilipollas’. Spain’s new prime minister immediately announced a dramatic switch of national policy. Not only would he pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. He wanted an ‘accelerated’ adoption of the constitution. ‘I believe we will rapidly reach an agreement,’ he told Cadena Ser radio.48 Half of the greatest single obstacle to that agreement, on which the Brussels IGC had foundered, had miraculously been removed. Poland was now on her own.
The immediate response of the EU to the Madrid bombing was to arrange ‘emergency terror talks’ between the EU’s ‘justice and home affairs’ ministers, designed to give ‘new momentum to Europe’s combined anti-terror measures’. These included stepping up cross-border co-operation in boosting security and intelligence.49 With Prodi calling for ‘joint action’ to fight terrorism which went further than anything agreed after 9/11, the integrationists had been quick to recognise yet another ‘beneficial crisis’.50
But the real impact of the events in Spain was the transformation they had wrought on prospects for the constitution. ‘Now Poland has been abandoned by Spain,’ wrote a leading Warsaw analyst, ‘the Polish government is looking for a face-saving option.’ 51 Within days it was being reported that Miller and Schröder were discussing a compromise on voting rights, then that Ahern was planning to restart the IGC and looking forward to final agreement on 17–18 June.52
For the ‘big three’, as the European Council approached, all was not going well at home. In local elections in Hamburg, Schröder’s Social Democrats had just suffered a humiliating defeat by the CDU. Chirac’s party then suffered a similar reverse in France’s regional elections, leading to calls for him to replace his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, with the more popular interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. For both leaders it was to mark the start of a long electoral decline. Meanwhile in Britain, reports that Blair was offering to abandon yet another of his ‘red line’ positions, removing the veto from key areas of judicial co-operation, prompted a wave of scornful press comment, led by banner headlines in the Sun such as ‘PM will sell out laws to EU’ and ‘12 weeks to stop Euro Superstate’.
As the heads of government gathered in Brussels on 26 March, they happily accepted Ahern’s proposal that the IGC should soon resume. The only cloud on the horizon was an admission by Prodi that the Lisbon dream of catching up the US economy by 2010 had become ‘a chimera’.53 But what did such irrelevances matter when, thanks to the intervention of Al Q’aeda, the constitution was now firmly back on track, with every prospect it could be agreed in June.
Let the people decide
On no leader did this prospect bring more pressure than Blair. The press, led by the Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and the Sunday Times, renewed the clamour for him to agree to a referendum (the Sunday Times publishing an ICM poll showing that he might lose by three-to-one).54 Business leaders were fearful that the continuous tide of regulations from Brussels might drag Britain’s economy, the most successful in Europe, down to the depressed level of those in the eurozone. A statement from the CBI, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Institute of Directors, the Federation of Small Businesses and nine other UK trade associations called for the EU’s leaders to focus on economic priorities, competitiveness and achieving the ‘Lisbon’ goals rather than being sidetracked by their obsession with the constitution.55 The British Chamber of Commerce separately complained that Britain’s red-tape burden was ‘out of control’, costing more than £30 billion a year.
Blair’s initial response to these renewed demands for a referendum was scornful. All these Eurosceptic objections, he said, were just ‘dumb’.56 If a treaty was agreed by June, he told Parliament, his government would quickly introduce a Bill to ratify it. Conservative opposition to the constitution, he said, was merely part of the Party’s ‘secret agenda’ to take Britain out of Europe.
Only two months away, however, were the elections for the European Parliament, and Blair did not want his refusal to grant a referendum to become a central issue in the campaign. Furthermore he and his advisers were keenly aware that this year, for the first time, the Euro-elections had been timed to coincide with local and regional elections. At stake were a quarter of all England’s 20,000 council seats, all those in Wales and in London the mayoralty and the assembly. By putting all these elections together, the intention was that both public interest and turnout would be increased.
The Tory leader Michael Howard now raised the pressure by embarking on a nationwide campaign to turn June’s Euro-elections into a ‘referen-dum on a referendum’ on the constitution. On 8 April Charles Kennedy, for the Liberal Democrats, joined forces with the Tories and rebel Labour MPs, arguing that any measure involving significant transfers of power away from Westminster ‘must be approved by the British people’.57 Even ministers in Blair’s own Cabinet, led by Straw and Brown, were now urging him to drop his opposition to a referendum.
Blair finally gave way. Despite a new Sun YouGov poll showing that only 16 percent of Britons would vote ‘Yes’, and 53 percent ‘No’, on 20 April he told Parliament:
‘It is time to resolve once and for all whether this country, Britain, wants to be at the centre and heart of European decision-making or not; time to decide whether our destiny lies as a leading partner and ally of Europe or on its margins. Let the Eurosceptics whose true agenda we will expose, make their case. Let those of us who believe in Britain in Europe … make ours. Let the issue be put. Let the battle be joined.’58
He had not actually brought himself to use the word ‘referendum’, but everyone knew what he meant. He was taking one of the greatest gambles of his career: that he could somehow turn a referendum on the constitution into a vote on whether Britain wished to stay in ‘Europe’ or leave. It was what his staff had for a year been calling the ‘nuclear option’: the one vote they thought they could win.
The response from many Europhiles was one of horror. Kenneth Clarke warned that Blair’s gamble could backfire badly. ‘I disapprove of a referendum,’ he said. ‘It is a serious blow to the sovereignty of Parliament.’59 Similar concern stretched out across the continent. Sweden’s prime minister, Goeran Persson, bruised by his people’s rejection of the euro, said ‘I think we’re heading down a dangerous path if we take this kind of decision away from the parliament and hand it over to a referendum’.60 Austria’s chancellor, Wolfgang Schuessel, was equally hostile, claiming it was wrong to allow national electorates to vote on the constitution. If there was to be a vote ‘it should be a European vote, a Europe-wide referendum, not eight or 10 or 15 or 25 single nation ballots’. But it was for Schröder and Chirac that the example set by Blair created the greatest problem. Electorally unpopular, Schröder was now under pressure to agree to a referendum in Germany, with polls showing this was wanted by more than two-thirds of voters. Pressure for a referendum was equally building up on Chirac, with a poll showing 74 percent in favour. Despite having given an election pledge that he would hold a referendum, Chirac said he was undecided. However, his stance was undermined when Giscard argued that all previous constitutions in France had been put to a popular vote. ‘To consult the French people on this subject’ he concluded, ‘is a reasonable and positive risk and it is right to take it.’ 61
The real problem with Britain having a referendum, of course, was that at this stage it seemed she was the one country which might vote ‘no’. What would happen then? Commissioner Chris Patten, supporting Blair’s ‘nuclear option’, put it about that, if there was a ‘no’ vote, Britain might have no choice but to pull out of the EU. ‘Senior officials’ from Downing Street and the Foreign Office hinted that for Britain’s position in the EU it could have ‘fatal consequences’.62 Giscard argued that Britain would not have to leave altogether, but would simply be left on the margins.63
The fact was that no one until now had really thought about what should happen if a major country such as Britain voted against the constitution. In such an event, admitted the Irish foreign minister Brian Cowen, there was no ‘Plan B’. ‘After Irish voters rejected the Nice treaty in October 2002’ he joked, ‘we produced our plan B, which was a blank sheet of paper. The plan B for the aftermath of the constitutional treaty under our presidency is also a blank sheet of paper. It’s the same piece, I have it at home.’64 Schröder insisted that, even if Britain or other countries voted ‘no’, the constitution must still enter into force.65 But Chirac, ironically in light of what was to happen a year later, took the hardest line of all. Any member state which failed to ratify within two years of signature, he told reporters in Paris, must leave the EU. It was a case of ‘ratify or quit’.66
At this point, with Poland joining the lengthening list of nations considering putting the issue to a popular vote (on the grounds that her government was now so unpopular that it might not be able to get the constitution ratified by parliament), the EU’s leaders prepared for the moment when, on 1 May 2004, the 10 newcomers would finally be received into the fold. It was an event Jean Monnet could not have imagined in his wildest dreams: the historic moment when that ‘government of Europe’ he had set in train would embrace 25 nations, including eight which for 40 years had been trapped in a Communist prison. As usual, it was left to the Czech president Klaus to strike the only dissenting note. The reality of the EU, he said, was ‘not freedom and openness, but bureaucracy, state intervention, regulation’. It was a prospect which filled him with gloom.67
The final slog
At the stroke of midnight on 1 May 2004, as fireworks exploded over Dublin, Malta and Prague, as orchestras from Brussels to Nicosia and Warsaw sawed out versions of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the European Union celebrated the biggest enlargement in its history. Its population was now 450 million, its territories stretching across three time zones. It now had 20 official languages, adding e800 million a year to its translation costs. The EU welcomed the newcomers, from countries notoriously addicted to tobacco, with a ban on smoking anywhere in its buildings.68
The next day Poland celebrated by dumping its unpopular prime minister Miller, replacing him with Marek Belka, a former finance minister who had returned to Warsaw after a year running economic policy in Iraq for the US-led coalition.
The chorus of warnings as to what would happen to countries which rejected the constitution continued. The French trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy said they would find themselves in the position of Switzerland, inviting the Daily Telegraph to observe that ‘if the worst Eurocrats can threaten us with is being like Switzerland, the richest and most democratic state in Europe, then roll on the referendum’.69 Lamy’s warning was echoed by his fellow commissioner Patten, now being touted as a possible Commission president in succession to Prodi, due soon to retire back to Italian politics. But Patten was quickly ruled out by the French for his lack of linguistic skills. A French official explained ‘he is not able to have a professional conversation on the phone with President Chirac or take part in a French political radio or TV programme. It is still of the utmost importance for France that the next president of the Commission speaks really good French.’ 70
On 4 May talks on the constitution resumed in Dublin. With just six weeks to go before the final summit, the presidency produced the first of what was to become a torrent of documents proposing amendments to Giscard’s text. This one, 130 pages long, incorporated changes already informally agreed before the December summit, and also several new proposals. These included an article allowing the Union to take action against smoking. Another proposed that the EU should encourage ‘the creation of a favourable environment for the development of enterprises’ in the tourism sector. More significantly the draft proposed the abolition of national vetoes in several more policy areas, including decisions on the rights of migrant workers and judicial co-operation in criminal law, both of which challenged Blair’s ‘red lines’. There were controversial proposals to increase the powers of the European Parliament over the Union budget and of the EU’s foreign minister. But there were no new proposals on what were still the most contentious issues of all: voting rights, and the size and composition of the Commission.
Also on the agenda was a grand tour by Ahern, planning to visit all 25 capitals of the enlarged Union in a bid to resolve the remaining bones of contention.71 He cannot have been pleased to hear Spain’s new foreign minister offering a formula on voting rights where a majority of states representing 66 percent of the population must be in favour of a measure, thus allowing states with 34 percent of the population to block decisions. The Poles also still wanted percentages closer to those agreed at Nice. Thus had the great European vision degenerated to haggling over percentage points.
On 9 May, ‘Europe Day’, Blair appeared on television with Chirac in Paris, reassuring French viewers that the majority of polls in Britain showed people supporting ‘the idea of a constitutional treaty which is appropriate for Europe’.72 Chirac himself was now under pressure to hold a referendum from senior members of the French government, including his prime minister Raffarin, his foreign and finance ministers, Barnier and Sarkozy, and the head of the ruling UMP party, Alain Juppé.73 But three days later, when Chirac and Schröder met in Paris, the only possibility they could contemplate was a failure to ratify by Britain, which might even lead to her expulsion from the EU. Otherwise, the two men were confident, ‘this important work of European unification’ would eventually be ratified.74
The EU’s foreign ministers were due to meet in Brussels on 17–18 May. Even before they gathered, Ireland had come up with yet more amendments. To the relief of Downing Street, the proposal to give the EU control of energy policy, threatening Britain’s rights to North Sea oil, had been dropped. Also diluted were articles which would have given the EU huge new powers over justice. A compromise on the size of the Commission proposed that it should be reduced to 18 members, which still meant there would be times when each country had no commissioner.75 By the time the foreign ministers met,76 several countries had come up with yet more proposals. Spain was pushing for the EU to give Catalan and other regional languages the same status as Irish. France wanted a new European Social Affairs Council to be written into the constitution, to appease those who thought its ‘economic liberalism’ threatened ‘Europe’s social model’. Hungary was still insisting on one commissioner for each nation. Nine states were pressing for the text to include a reference to ‘Christian values’, to which others, including Ireland, were strongly opposed. But still there was no progress on the crucial issue of voting rights, and Poland’s foreign minister emerged from the meeting to say he was now ‘less optimistic’ about the chances of a deal by 18 June. It didn’t help that the new Polish prime minister Belka had just lost a parliamentary vote of confidence, leaving his country’s government in disarray.
Cowen, the Irish foreign minister, arranged a further ‘emergency meeting’ of foreign ministers a week later, to focus on ‘the most sensitive institutional questions’, notably voting rights. This left the Poles still not happy, but at least they conceded that chances of agreement looked better. The most likely compromise was a version of the ‘double majority’, allowing the votes of 55 percent of member states representing 65 percent of the EU’s population to carry the day. Cowen summed up, according to one report: ‘things are taking shape. We are entering the final straight.’77
Then came another hiccup, when Belka, his party now facing a corruption scandal, tried to placate his parliament by upping the ante on voting rights yet again, demanding a population split of 80–20.78 This was way beyond what was acceptable to anyone. Defying the no-confidence vote, Poland’s president Aleksander Kwasniewski was determined to re-appoint Belka as prime minister, but this could not be put to the Polish parliament before the IGC summit. As all the opposition parties were against the constitution, it looked as if Belka’s only hope of gaining parliamentary backing for his re-appointment was to threaten to sabotage the treaty. With this new, unexpected setback, the Irish president of the European Parliament Pat Cox gloomily joined Ahern in predicting that the chances for success at the IGC had now dropped back again to only 50–50.79
The Treaty is agreed (with noises off)
It was curiously timely that the final run-in to the summit should coincide with the elections to the European Parliament. On one hand, Europe’s political elite was preoccupied with all their last-minute manoeuvrings over the Constitution. On the other, the peoples of Europe were being given the collective chance to vote, if only for people of whom most had never heard, to sit in a mysterious institution of which they knew nothing.
Drafts and redrafts from the Irish presidency continued to pour onto the desks and screens of officials and ministers of the 25 governments. CIG 79/04 (to indicate that it was the 79th ‘presidency communication’ since January) ran to 75 pages. This was followed by CIG 80/04, containing only 25. Spain and Poland had once again upped their demand on the voting majority to two-thirds of the population. Chirac and Schröder announced they would be meeting in Aachen on 14 June for the usual ‘pre-summit’ bilateral talks, to agree a Franco-German ‘common position’. The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, called for a major return of powers from Brussels to the nation states, saying that integration had gone too far and lacked popular consent. A senior Dutch official said the speech was intended to be a warning to a high-handed elite in Brussels which appeared to have lost touch with reality: ‘the feeling is that we risk a popular revolt unless the citizens start to feel represented.’80
Between Thursday 10 June and the following Sunday, the voters of 25 nations turned out to choose their party list MEPs. When the first results were reported on Sunday night, two things soon became obvious. The first was that the popular turnout was easily the lowest on record, for the first time dropping below 50 percent. This was most conspicuous in the former Communist countries of the east, where Slovakia recorded only 16.7 percent, with Poland not far behind on 20.4. Even in western Europe, however, average turnouts plumbed new lows, Germany and France achieving only 43 percent, down by a third since 1979. One of the few countries to report a sharp increase was Britain, up from its 1999 low of 24 percent to 39.
The other feature of the results was a widespread swing away from governing parties towards those representing different varieties of ‘Euroscepticism’. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Britain, where Labour’s 23 percent share was a full 19 points below its performance at the 2001 general election. The Conservatives, on 25 percent, won most seats and the biggest share, but, compared with the 1999 elections, their 9 percent drop was the largest of any party. This was because the sensation of the election was the success of the UK Independence Party, fighting on a platform of withdrawal from the EU, whose 2,660,278 votes, or 16.2 percent, put them into third place, well ahead of the Liberal Democrats and giving them 12 MEPs. It was by far the highest vote ever achieved by a fourth party in a UK election (a record previously held by Goldsmith’s Referendum Party in 1997), and the culmination of a campaign which had seen the party attract a number of celebrity supporters, including the television personality Robert Kilroy-Silk, elected for one of three British regional constituencies where UKIP came second.
The elections left the centre-right European People’s Party with 278 out of 732 MEPs as the largest grouping in the Parliament. The decision of the British Conservatives to remain with the fervently integrationist EPP had been a factor in weakening the Tories’ appeal to Eurosceptics. But Howard’s response to the surge in support for UKIP, far from being to harden his party’s highly ambivalent ‘European’ policy, was to order his MPs to keep quiet about it. ‘I am not interested in presiding over a debating society,’ he told them at a private meeting; ‘frankly nobody is interested in hearing your views.’81
Although ruling parties throughout the EU had been damaged by the Euro-elections, there was no hint of contrition from Anne Anderson, Irish ambassador to the EU, speaking on behalf of the presidency. To her, the abstainers and people who voted for Eurosceptic parties were saying that: ‘Europe cannot afford a failure because of the depressing message that such a failure would send.’ 82
Meanwhile the foreign ministers had met in Brussels on 14 June, prompting two more lengthy papers from the Irish. 81/04 ran to 89 pages, covering 57 topics. The other, 82/04, suggested compromise solutions to the thorny ‘institutional questions’. These included a reduction in the number of commissioners to 18, but not until 2014; and a 55/65 percent formula for majority voting, with some complex face-saving concessions for the Poles.
Thus arrived the morning of Thursday 17 June 2004 when the heads of government met in Brussels for the fateful summit. Day one was largely uneventful until dinner in the evening, which saw a blazing row over who should succeed Prodi as the next Commission president, a decision which had to be taken before the end of the month. Schröder and Chirac wanted their ally Verhofstadt, Blair (echoing Major’s veto of another Belgian, Dehaene) was strongly opposed.83
Overnight the Irish produced yet another document, 83/04, clarifying the complex formula proposed on QMV (with a ‘blocking minority’ which must include four governments). On Friday a two hour discussion in the morning was followed by six hours of private ‘confessionals’, with Ahern desperately seeking to tie up the last loose ends. Just after 5 pm the BBC’s Brussels correspondent excitably reported: ‘It’s all over – it’s done!’ In fact it was not until just before 10 pm that the heads of government could be presented with a final text of the outstanding amendments. By 10.30 all had been agreed.
Blair, pale and bleary-eyed, came out to claim that the constitution was a ‘success for Britain and a success for Europe’. His words were echoed by many others, including Giscard, who pronounced ‘c’est un bon texte pour l’Europe, c’est un bon texte pour les Européens’.84 Graham Watson, now leader of the European Liberal Democrat group of MEPs, declared ‘the governments who have approved this Constitution now have a duty to go home and sell it to their people’.
At that moment, amid the sound of popping champagne corks, and 27 wearisome months after Giscard’s Convention first met, it must have seemed to most of those involved that this would now be little more than a formality.
1 For a time during the Convention’s deliberations it had been mooted that the Union should have just one single ‘President of Europe’, presiding over both Council and Commission, but this was soon ruled out as a step too far.
2 It was interesting to note how Giscard’s draft in some respects more closely echoed the language and structures of the constitution of the old USSR than that of the USA. The Soviet Constitution, uniting 15 republics under a supranational ‘Union’ government, included a Council of Ministers, a Court of Justice, a parliament and a guiding ‘Praesidium’. Each of the constituent republics, like the EU’s member states, retained the outward semblance of its own governing structures, even including its own ‘foreign minister’. But in practice all this was subordinated to the central ‘Union’ government in Moscow.
3 The eight signatories to the minority report (published as Annexe III of Giscard’s draft) included three MEPs (a Dane, a Finn and a Frenchman) and five MPs (two Danes, a Czech, an Irishman and David Heathcoat-Amory). They cited eight points on which the draft failed to meet the intentions of Laeken and five criticising the Convention’s undemocratic procedures (such as Giscard’s failure to allow votes). They ended with 15 recommendations of their own for a much looser ‘Union’, based on the co-operation of sovereign states.
4 The Guardian, 3 July 2003.
5 Prodi, Romano, speech on Europe and the Constitution: ‘Letting the People Have Their Say’, Bologna, 5 July 2003.
6 AFP, 4 July 2003.
7 The Scotsman, 18 June 2003.
8 The Daily Telegraph, 16 July 2003.
9 AFP, 10 September 2003.
10 The Daily Mail, 16th July 2003.
11 The Times, 19 September 2003.
12 The Times, 26 September 2003.
13 The Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2003.
14 The Daily Telegraph, 22 September 2003.
15 The Financial Times, 24 November 2003.
16 The Scotsman, 28 November 2003.
17 The Times, 25 November 2003.
18 UPI Washington, 24 November 2003.
19 The Times, 27 November 2003.
20 The Daily Telegraph, 29 November 2003.
21 The Times, 29 November 2003.
22 The Daily Telegraph, 29 November 2003.
23 The Independent, 12 December 2003.
24 The Guardian, 10 December 2003.
25 Clover, Charles (2004), The End of the Line: How Over-fishing Is Changing the World (London, Ebury Press).
26 The Sunday Times, 14 December 2003.
27 The Daily Telegraph, 15 December 2003.
28 AFP, 1 January 2004.
29 Reuters, 15 January 2004.
30 AFP, 2 January 2004.
31 Deutsche Welle, 3 January 2004.
32 AFP, 10 January 2004.
33 The Daily Telegraph, 10 January 2004.
34 AFP, 23 January 2004.
35 The Daily Telegraph, 16 January 2004.
36 AFP, 18 February 2004.
37 AFP, 17 February 2004.
38 AFP, 18 February 2004.
39 EU Observer, 18 February 2004.
40 The Malta Times, 21 February 2004.
41 19 February 2004.
42 AFP, 3 March 2004.
43 AFP, 4 March 2004.
44 AFP, 5 March 2004.
45 IHT/Irish Independent, 6 March 2004.
46 The Financial Times, 10 March 2004.
47 AFP, 12 March 2004.
48 AFP, 15 March 2004.
49 The Scotsman, 15 March 2004.
50 AFP, 15 March 2004.
51 Alexsandr Smolar, quoted in the Guardian, 17 March 2004.
52 The Financial Times, 23 March 2004.
53 The Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2004.
54 28 March 2004.
55 The Daily Telegraph, 1 March 2004.
56 The Independent, 27 March 2004.
57 The Daily Telegraph, 9 April 2004.
58 Hansard, 20 April 2003.
59 The Evening Standard, 22 April 2004.
60 AFP, 20 April 2004.
61 AP Worldstream, 27 April 2004.
62 The Observer, 25 April 2004.
63 BBC Radio 4, Today programme; the Independent, 29 April 2004.
64 AFP, 23 April 2004.
65 The Sunday Times, 25 April 2004.
66 The Financial Times, 30 April 2004.
67 AFP, 27 April 2004. Also in April a high-level study group set up by Prodi under the chairmanship of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, produced a report on Building A Political Europe: 50 Proposals for Tomorrow’s Europe. This began by admitting that Europe had reached a ‘turning point in its history’, that its institutions were ‘functioning badly, threatened with paralysis and challenged on the grounds of their democratic deficit’, and that the ‘project has run out of steam’. The group concluded that the remedy was to recognise that the constitutional treaty was ‘not the conclusion but the starting point of the transformation of Europe into a political union’. Among its proposals for achieving this were a much greater transfer of powers to a ‘fully-fledged political government’ of Europe, with its own budget and taxes; radical new measures to create a sense of ‘European identity’, particularly through the education system; and the European Parliament to be given ‘full legislative powers’, including those to revise the constitution.
68 This ban was widely ignored. Within months ‘smoking areas’ had been reinstated in the bars of the European Parliament.
69 3 May 2004.
70 Eupolitix, 7 May 2004.
71 AFP, 4 May 2004.
72 Reuters, 9 May 2004.
73 The Financial Times, 9 May 2004.
74 AFP, 13 May 2004.
75 Reuters, 13 May 2004.
76 http://european-Convention.eu.int/docs/Treaty/cv00850.en03.pdf
77 The Financial Times, 24 May 2004.
78 Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 31 May 2004.
79 Reuters; AFP, 31 May 2004.
80 The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 2004.
81 The Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2004.
82 The Irish Times, 17 June, 2004.
83 Norman, op. cit., p. 293.
84 EurActiv, 25 June 2004.