A clean trio. It is once more from the "Notre Europe" association, chaired by Jacques Delors, that a stimulating document is produced. Stimulating through its content and also due to its authors: two Directors General from the European Commission, Francois Lamoureux and Eneko Landaburu, and the special advisor to Commissioner Lamy, Jean Durieux (see bulletin of 10 May, p.6). They hope, as do others, that the debate over the institutional functioning of the future Europe calms itself for a moment, in order to avoid the rough patches that are radiated by the positions and cause polemics, and that the attention concentrates firstly on the objectives. The institutional framework will then stem from the fundamental choices. It is an idea that it gaining ground. Though it is another aspect that hit me.
The document's starting point is that the EU 15 do not have a common vision of the Europe to build: they are divided between market-Europe (note: new definition of what Giscard d'Estaing called area-Europe) and power-Europe. This is why the three authors favour a global project of deepening the EU, to the service of a common vision of a European society and the world society to build, while adding: it is for the Commission to take this initiative and to thus rediscover its fundamental function. The authors admit from the outset that the alternative project to that of the market-Europe would not be accepted by all the EU15 or by all the candidate countries. The aim would be for them to gather the largest number of Member States and generate a new common ambition.
Make the vanguard reality unavoidable? The use of such a project is evident: it would clarify the debates made impossible by the botched compromises and so-called "pragmatic" solutions. It could force the member countries and the candidates to take a position. Those who share it would constitute the vanguard, which would not consist of different "enhanced cooperation" giving rise to the Europe a la carte (formula very well described by the three authors as a nebula of punctual actions with variable participation), but which would constitute a true group of countries decided to achieve greater integration amongst themselves. Thus we find, behind this construction, the requirement asserted for a long time by Jacques Delors (and, in a slightly different manner, by Valery Giscard d'Estaing) an authentic vanguard, open to all the Community countries, but coherent from the outset with its own institutions.
Doubtful unanimity. The three people push the Commission to act, by reproaching it for not sufficiently ensuring its basic job, which is one of strategic inspiration and political impetus. Thus they put their finger on the true problem: is the Commission sufficiently compact in this domain to establish a project, while knowing that it would initially be rejected by certain Member States? Last week, when presenting the Treaty of Nice to French parliamentarians, Mr Moscovici recalled with a certain degree of malice that, in Nice, the Commission President, during the debates by the Summit on institutional reform, did not speak in favour of a reduced Commission; according to the French Minister, it did not show itself sufficiently, in the circumstance, guarantor, as is its roe, of the higher European interest. Mr Moscovici knows well the reasons for the Commission's behaviour: it is that a majority of the Commissioners moved in favour of the "one Commissioner per country formula"… The situation risks reproducing itself with regards to the alternative project to the market-Europe, which Mr Durieux, Mr Lamoureux and Mr Landaburu call in favour of: How many Commissioner where opposed? Though let us be sincere: with the Schröder system, which would entrust the Commission with all of the executive power, which State present or future would permit itself not to have "its" Commissioner, even temporarily? Everything is interconnected.
The second chamber? It already exists, according to Jos Chabert. The President of the Committee of the Regions (COR), expressed his surprise in the face of the discussions and polemics underway over the possibility of creating, in the EU, a second Chamber, a "European Senate" that would mainly represent the regions and the local authorities, and which guarantees the respect for the principal of subsidiarity. Why is Mr Chabert surprised? Because, he asserts in the body of the COR, the European Union already has an institution whose members have an electoral mandate in their country, a body that is the guardian of the principal of subsidiarity and whose mission is to have the voices of the regions, cities and communes in the member countries heard. The reader would have guessed: this body is for Mr Chabert the Committee of the Regions, the youngest and most dynamic of all the European institutions. It would suffice to enhance it, to give a more binding nature to its opinions, and we would see that the representatives of the cities and regions are already gathered within a European Union Assembly (F.R.)