A good mark for the Belgian Presidency of the Council, which is now knocking at the door. The way in which Guy Verhoftasdt recovered, mutatis mutandis, the idea of "wise people" to contribute to reflection on tomorrow's Europe and the preparation of the "Laeken Declaration" is excellent. The European Council as a whole wants none of the "wise people", or, rather, some of its members don't. We can understand them, as wise people would find it hard to share in the idea of a cut-price European project or the dismantling of certain common policies, and even less so a break in the Parliament/Council/Commission institutional balance. What then did the Belgian Prime Minister do? He surrounded himself personally with a few advisors, giving up the term "wise people" which, when discussed by the European Council, had ruffled certain Heads of Government ("the wise are to be found within the European Council", Jacques Chirac declared).
More than likely, we shall simply be speaking of a "Laeken Group", that Mr. Verhofstadt will consult orally, without written documents. The Belgian Prime Minister will thus be able to surround himself with the opinions of Jacques Delors, Jean-Luc Dehaene, Giulioano Amato, Bronislav Geremek, plus some others who could represent British sensitivities (if Tony Blair would care to suggest a name), or German sensitivities, or even Spanish ones. There is nothing formal in it, nor any genuine team work; Verhostadt will retain entire responsibility for what he proposes for the "Laeken Declaration". And that will be a weighty responsibility, given the expectations surrounding that declaration, the already obvious differences as to its nature (some governments consider that it should not go beyond the organisation of later work) and the possibility that the declaration could already lead to a break between the Fifteen.
A difficult model to reproduce. Why already a risk of a break? Because difficulties begin from the time of establishing the modalities for the broad reflection scheduled for next year. It is all too easily said that the model of the "Convention" that prepared the Charter of Fundamental Rights should be used. In fact, the two exercises are not comparable. The Charter was to flesh-out, improve, put in order principles or which a kind of consensus already existed, as well as, since the French and American revolutions, precedents which meant that they did not have to start from scratch. The Convention undertook admirable work and found compromises on controversial issues because differences related to the degree of commitment, on whether to place more or less emphasis on new rights (social, economic, environmental), whereas the major principles were already agreed upon. The Convention was able to act through a consensus. Differences over the future of Europe, on the other hand, are radical: suffice it to compare the Schroeder project and Jospin's to note that the institutional models differ radically, even within tendencies that claim to be pro-European. And the eurosceptics, or the sovereignists, consider that the EU is already too far down the road to supra-nationality, and that rather than moving forward, we should do better to back peddle. The outcome is that the path of consensus is not practicable, except to admit that ambitions be continually downgraded in the search for a compromise on each difference. And if we abandon the principle of the consensus to provide for a Convention which votes, everything changes. The composition and voting rights become fundamental, and room would also have to be left for a minority text.
As we see, discussion on the method already involves issues of substance, procedural decisions will have an influence on the rest of the process.
False images. In my account of 19 June, I had the opportunity of observing the emergence of a new generation of politicians in favour of genuine European integration. I'll add a proviso. Sometimes, new adepts bring with them simplistic prejudgments of today's reality. For example, in a text that forcefully calls for the creation of a Europe that should become "a project of civilization", Jean-Pierre Soisson, writes: "politics has given way to technocracy that has provided the EU with the image of machine to calibrate bananas, prevent hunters hunting and remove taste from chocolate". How many false ideas in this shorthand! The affair of the bananas implies a battle of civilization, in favour of poor countries towards which Europe has commitments, against the superpower of a few multinationals. EU rules do not ban hunting but want to regulate it (with some amount of clumsiness, true) to protect nature, migrating birds, wetlands. Norms for chocolate, necessary to guarantee its free movement, have introduced labeling that tells you the percentage of cocoa, and it is over these percentages that manufacturers are now competing, to the benefit of the consumer and the quality of the product. Principles, noble objectives must at some given time take the form of operational measures, otherwise they remain empty rhetoric. (F.R.)