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The European Parliament should have co-decision
making powers on all legislation and the budget
The Council should meet as an assembly,
not as a committee, and vote by majority
Each Council should elect an individual
to act as permanent chair for a 2½ year period
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Introduction
1. The European Union is a unique and pioneering international
system. It has a mixture of intergovernmental and supranational features,
set up after the second world war to establish a shared democracy amongst
the countries of Europe. This was to replace the secret diplomacy that
had failed so dramatically in the recent past.
2. As time has passed since then, the EU has acquired
new powers and attracted new member states, and the diplomatic methods
of decision-making (secrecy, unanimity) have slowly been replaced by democratic
ones (openness, majority voting). It now needs to go further towards becoming
a parliamentary democracy with a legitimate and effective means of taking
and implementing decisions.
3. This paper outlines how to reform the legislative
process of the EU.
4. Federal Union, on whose behalf this paper has been
prepared, was founded in 1938 and campaigns for federalism for the UK,
Europe and the world. It believes that democracy and the rule of law should
apply to states as well as within them.
Opening up the legislative process
5. The legislative process of the European Union (or
more correctly the legislative processes, for there are many of them)
is slow, erratic, and unaccountable. Substantial parts of the EU budget
are similarly out of reach of the democratically elected European Parliament.
This needs to be changed.
6. The most successful areas of European policy - the
single market, the environment - are those which have been subject to
the Community method of decision-making, meaning that proposals are made
by the European Commission and submitted to the European Parliament and
the Council for approval. The unsuccessful areas of policy - agriculture,
foreign affairs - are those where the Council has dominated decision-taking
at the expense of the European Commission and European Parliament. There
is a lesson to be learned here.
7. All legislative and budgetary decisions should be
taken on the basis of co-decision between the European Parliament (directly
elected by the citizens) and the Council (representing the member states).
The Council must end its diplomatic habits of secrecy and instead adopt
normal democratic decision-making procedures.
8. Legislative proposals should be published and sufficient
time allowed for analysis and scrutiny - importantly, in national parliaments
- before formal readings in the European Parliament and the Council. Amendments
to these proposals must also be published and open to analysis and scrutiny
in the same way.
9. This might sound obvious, but it is not. Too often
in the Council at present, amendments arise during the meetings and there
have been occasions of genuine uncertainty about what is being proposed
and discussed. It acts like a committee, where the chair takes the sense
of the meeting, rather than an assembly which takes decisions by casting
votes. The results of a meeting might not be known for several days until
the relevant civil servants have deciphered their notes and written the
minutes of the meeting. This is an absurd way for a democratic decision-making
body to behave. The normal methods of democracy must become the rule.
Bringing continuity to the Council
10. A weakness of the legislative process is that the
chair of the Council changes every six months. Member states take it in
turns to chair the Council and set themselves grand targets and objectives
in an attempt to boost their international prestige and appeal to their
voters at home. These attempts to set the agenda are always futile. The
EU lurches from one priority to another without adequate preparation or
follow-up, and badly thought-out legislation is rushed through in the
dying days of the six month period so that each national presidency can
claim some successes. This good neither for the EU nor for its citizens.
11. The rotating presidency is a perfect example of
the diplomatic heritage of the EU. Every member state has an equal share
in the system and no hard decisions have to be taken. It is now time to
move to a democratic system of chairing the Council.
12. The key to this lies in unpacking what is meant
by the term "presidency". It consists of three tasks:
- providing political leadership for the Union as a
whole;
- chairing the Council sessions, both legislative and
executive;
- providing the secretariat for the Council meetings
themselves.
13. The first of these, providing political leadership,
does not form part of the legislative process. It is considered in a separate
paper from Federal Union.
14. The third of these can better be done by a dedicated
full-time secretariat in Brussels. It already exists in embryo: it simply
needs to be staffed properly. The wholesale diversion of national civil
servants that is required at present whenever a member state assumes the
presidency has a debilitating effect on the conduct of the normal business
of national government, particularly in small member states. It is time
to end this process and professionalise the administration of the Council.
15. If we approach the concept of the presidency by
breaking it down into its constituent parts, we are then left with the
task of chairing the Council sessions. Bearing in mind that there is not
one but in fact several different Councils, each covering a different
area of policy, the solution is straightforward. Each Council should elect
its own chair - a person, not a member state - to serve for a 2½
year term, the same timetable as that followed by the European Parliament.
The person elected to chair each Council will no doubt be a senior and
experienced politician in that particular field, whether agriculture,
economics or whatever, and would be a very significant figure in the development
of European Union policy on that issue.
16. The absurdity of the six month changeover would
be ended and replaced by continuity and expertise. Democracy would have
replaced diplomacy.
Majority voting in the Council
17. A European Union with 25 or more member states will
grind to a halt if national vetoes are still cast. Bear in mind that the
effect of a veto might apply not only to issues formally settled by unanimity
but might also extend to other issues: member states have been known in
the past to link issues, vetoing something they would rather support in
order to get their way on an issue where the veto does not otherwise apply.
The only way to ensure that the EU is not affected by this gridlock is
to make majority voting in the Council the general rule.
18. The fact that the member states are of such different
sizes - Germany has 200 times the population of Luxembourg - makes finding
an acceptable balance between them difficult. The negotiations leading
up to the Nice summit showed how tortuous it could be: only five per cent
of the total votes were redistributed as a result. Furthermore, there
is no provision for the accession of future member states or changes in
the structure of existing ones (for example, the possible break-up of
Belgium or independence for Catalonia or Scotland).
19. A system of double majority voting solves all this.
A majority in the Council would be composed of a majority of member states
representing a majority of the EU's population. The interests of both
big and small member states are protected, and an unambiguous principle
is established for the future.
Dispelling Euroscepticism
20. With the introduction of the single market programme
in the 1980s, decisions taken in the European Union suddenly became much
more relevant to citizens than they had ever been before. However, the
sudden increase in the reach of the European Union was not matched by
an equivalent development of democracy in the decision-making process
itself.
21. Euroscepticism (in its true sense of genuine doubt
about the European Union rather than committed and ideological opposition
to it) grew as a result. Subsequent moves towards a more open system of
decision-making, with more powers to be exercised by the directly-elected
European Parliament, have been grudging. Now is the time for the European
Constitutional Convention finally to settle the question.
Conclusion
22. The inefficient, opaque and unaccountable legislative
process is one of the main reasons why the European Union is unpopular.
Opening up that process - generalising co-decision powers for the European
Parliament and transforming the Council from a committee into an assembly
- will restore public confidence in the EU and the decisions that it takes.
March 2003
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