Debate on future has already begun. Guy Verhofstadt has nothing to fear: even if the debate he provoked with regard to European integration has not taken a formal, solemn or doctrinal character, it will, in practice, be unavoidable during the different phases of applying the Lisbon Treaty. This column indicated (EUROPE 10049) that a number of heated discussions have broken out even before the overall debate: the definition of new financial Union perspectives involves maintaining cohesion policy (with a number of repercussions on Turkish accession) and the future of the common agricultural policy.
These debates have begun and have already revealed some strong and interesting positions. There is, nonetheless, something strange about them because they are based…on a document that is not actually a… document. I am referring to the draft, too often mistakenly described as the “Barroso Document”, which is in fact a draft produced by his Commission services and group of senior officials in liaison with a number of economists: “Reforming the budget, changing Europe”. The president of the Commission requested it because he thought it useful that the College give its view on the main orientations for the Union's post-2013 “financial perspectives” but he has never taken a position on its contents. The title of the first commentary in this column was, “a document that president Barroso will not sign as it stands” and he explained that it would never become a Commission document without serious amendments. The Commission effectively decided that it would be up to the Barroso II Commission to give its opinion at a later date (which is not likely to be for several months' time) on the future of the Community budget.
Positive aspects and aspects to change. Several aspects in the old draft are positive, such as the setting up of a genuine Union's own resources (which would get rid of the concept of “fair return”), greater budget flexibility, the creation of a single fund for trans-European networks. But the double orientation for drastically reducing common agricultural policy and cohesion policy funding, with the intention of putting more resources into research, innovation, energy and climate, will not be maintained as such. I have long been aware of the doctrine on which this orientation is based. It is based on two assumptions:
a) agriculture only accounts for a minimum number of jobs and small segment of the Community economy. Protection of European production is anti-economic and damages poor countries in the world; exports are expensive and upset the balance in world trade. The CAP must therefore be scaled-down and simplified and each member state should assume a large part of the spending affecting it;
b) there is no sense to a regional policy covering the whole of the Community's territory and it is absurdly bureaucratic. Prosperous member states receive the money that they have paid in themselves and that just makes a pointless detour via Brussels; they could quite easily manage national support for their poor regions directly. Cohesion policy should quite simply consist of funding from prosperous countries to the others, which would use it as they see fit under Commission surveillance. Anything else is just a waste.
Wild theoretical imaginings. This doctrine is nothing but wild bureaucratic imaginings and the result of theoretical analysis by very knowledgeable economists, who have no experience at all of the political situation and no understanding of the daily lives of citizens and their aspirations and concerns. Their analyses are useful, sometimes indispensable and often very valuable because they reveal, and allow for the rectification of, the waste and abuses (which are many and sometimes inadmissible) involved in managing the CAP and regional policy, as highlighted in documents provided by the European Court of Auditors. These officials and economists, however, do not have political responsibility for assessing the significance and role played by European agriculture, particularly in relation to the EU's food self-sufficiency; safeguarding nature and ways of life; and the contribution to the fight against starvation in the world. Since October, this column has strived to pose essential questions that Europe should ask itself with regard to the CAP (EUROPE 997). The European Parliament's agriculture committee is currently (encouraged by its president) involved in actively tackling this question and we are awaiting positions to be taken in this connection.
As for cohesion policy, the Committee of the Regions has significantly increased the number of its firm positions on the question and last month Parliament dedicated a huge debate to it, from which the orientation enthusiastically called for it to be maintained and even strengthened (EUROPE 10044). The EU will not give up on agriculture and cohesion. This column will return to the issue tomorrow.
(F.R./transl.fl)