Europe’s constitution: The EU will soon grow out of its new clothes

Deputy Director of the London Centre of European reform, Heather Grabbe, believes that the EU will have to agree on another round of reforms in 2008 because the enlarged Union’s decision-making could be gridlocked by that time.

Next week the European Convention will finalize its draft constitution for the European Union. The convention’s president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, hopes the document will last for 50 years. It is a good first attempt, but the current version has a use-by date of around 2008.

The convention has put forward some useful proposals, but they do not go far enough. The EU’s enlargement from 15 to 25 members in 2004 will change much more than the constitution’s drafters expect.

Although the convention – a 105-member body including government representatives and deputies from the national and European Parliaments – was supposed to debate “the future of Europe,” it mostly focused on the existing EU’s problems.

The draft constitution contains some welcome changes to improve efficiency and leadership. For example, the EU’s member states currently make decisions by a complicated system of weighted votes. Under the new constitution, this “qualified majority vote” will be replaced by a simpler “double majority” of states and populations. To give stronger leadership, the convention proposes the creation of a full-time chair of the EU’s top decision-making body, the European Council, and a foreign minister for the EU.

But enlargement will bring new challenges that the convention has not dealt with adequately. More members and greater diversity will put the EU’s structures under strain, but the difference will be more than arithmetical. Enlargement will cause qualitative changes too, most notably to the EU’s external role and its internal political dynamics.

External policy will become more important because the Union will have new responsibilities. It will cover another third of the European continent, and it will share a border with poor countries that need its help to improve their stability and prosperity. To deal with problems in its neighborhood – the countries to its east, as well as North Africa and the Balkans – the EU needs to streamline its decision-making on foreign policy and internal security and devote more resources to them.

The creation of a new foreign minister for the EU is a welcome step, but it is only a start toward making the EU punch its weight in world affairs. The Union needs to join up all its policies that have an external dimension – from foreign aid to migration and agricultural trade – and make them work together more effectively. To do that, it will need to build more substantial foreign policy-making structures at EU level.

The EU’s internal political dynamics will change too. With 25 or more members, not every country will be able and willing to participate fully in every new project. But the constitutional convention has made little progress on allowing countries to have different levels of participation. The constitution should make it easier for small groups of countries to move ahead with projects that might not suit all 25.

Later this year, the member governments will have a chance to revise the constitution. But many governments are now in defensive mode, seeking to reduce the impact of the convention’s proposed reforms rather than making them more radical. If they unravel the deals reached in the convention, major problems will quickly emerge after enlargement. It will be much harder to gain consensus between 25 countries with a much greater variety of views.

The most likely date for another round of reforms is 2008. The new constitution will probably come into effect in 2005 or 2006. Meanwhile, the EU’s 25 leaders will be locked in combat over the next EU budget for the first two years after enlargement, as the current financial deal runs out at the end of 2006. They will have little energy for more institutional reform. But by 2008, EU decision-making could be gridlocked.

A crisis could ensue, but it would be a necessary one, forcing the EU to take an ax to its unwieldy institutions. The EU’s history shows that it rarely reforms itself until the need is urgent. The convention would probably never have existed if expansion had not been imminent. Enlargement is a necessary catalyst for long-overdue reforms, but the new constitution will be only the first step. Major amendments to Giscard’s constitution will probably start well within the lifetime of its 77-year-old founder, not 50 years hence.

This article was first published in the International Herald Tribune.

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