Brussels, 05/09/2002 (Agence Europe) - The French UDF MEP Alain Lamassoure, Member of the European Convention, has presented a contribution to the Convention affirming that the traditional debate between the defenders of the European Commission and the defenders of the Council can no longer be posed in the same terms because of the revolution of quantity (the number of EU Member States) which condemns the EU to qualified majority decision-making and the creation of an executive power - "a President, a Mr or Ms Europe". He said time was ripe for a people's revolution and the new founding text produced by the Convention cannot be ratified without a referendum in a large number of Member States - starting with France (see yesterday's Europe, pp 6 and 7). The EU will be democratic or it will not exist, stressed Lamassoure, concluding that the political will of governments has long played a decisive role. In a thirty-state EU nobody could imagine one state or a group of states exercising a de facto leadership. The European Parliament does not have the vocation to play this role and there will be too many Council members so the engine can only be the European Executive, if it has genuine popular legitimacy. This is the usual situation in any political body - a Mayor of a council, President of a region, head of state gives the impetus and leads activity, strengthened by the support of their electors. Great Europe needs a strong engine with the energy of five hundred million citizens.
Lamassoure sees the problem facing the Convention being how to design the organisation of great Europe that will allow thirty-odd states to act effectively and democratically together in the range of powers set out in the current Treaties. Assuming that the range of powers will not be challenged to any great extent, he compares four broad types of imaginable organisations, federal and confederal models and two possible compromises, adding the two together or the different path of the Community model. He remarks that the comparison shows that there are quite a few points common to all models - the existence of shared legislative power between Parliament and Council; qualified majority decision-making in Council; the need for a European executive that defines the common interest, proposes, coordinates and monitors application (even though the denomination, source of legitimacy, designation mode, political responsibility, size and even role may differ from one model to the next). Whichever is chosen, Lamassoure argues:
- One will not do without reforming the Commission. A Commission with one Commissioner per country is not viable, argues the former French European Affairs Minister, adding that above all, one has to realise that any democratic legitimacy given to the Commission or its President (by parliamentary election for example) will change the nature of the institution, making it emanate from a political majority to which it will have to report back. This is the price to be paid for citizens appropriating Europe - the leaders of Europe will have to be put in the reach of citizens' ballot papers.
- With thirty members, the European Council itself will change its nature since it will have as many members as the League of Nations' General Assembly in the 1920s. Assemblies of this type can give impetus and general guidelines but can no longer claim to be the permanent pilot of the ship (drawing parallels with company law, Lamassoure said it would be the surveillance council rather than the executive board). The MEP says that at the same time, the problem of the Presidency of the European Council evaporates (the problem was raised recently by Chirac/Blair/Aznar's ideas about a Presidency lasting several years, Ed) since Lamassoure explains that the true political problems is the problem of the head of the executive and if the Council is not confused with the executive, the choosing its President will have no more than diplomatic importance.
Lamassoure says the most precious part of the experiment is not the written texts but actually working together, the habit of listening to others, collective decision-making in several languages, the emergence of new solidarity superimposed on national solidarity, the astonishing discovery that the fruits of this inevitably complicated machinery is generally better than the most inspired decision taken by a single unit. Basically, he added, the art of living together, a quiet miracle that means that French citizens ungrudgingly
accept decisions taken by a qualified majority authority, on which sit representatives of all our traditional enemies. Therefore, concluded Lamassoure, the principle of subsidiarity has to be balanced, which means retaining the largest number of powers at the closest level to the citizen and retaining the Community spirit, which should strongly unite us for what we want to undertake together.