A week of celebration for Europe. We were feeling a need for it. Developments regarding financial perspectives for 2007-13 and the “services” directive are doubly positive: 1) they prove that due (in particular) to the increased powers of the European Parliament, the European institutional system can work; 2) they will vigorously re-launch European activity in the next few years.
The Europe of compromises. Europe with 25 members (soon to be 27) is out of necessity, a Europe of compromises. On certain subjects, a common will and goal can and must prevail; we are hoping that this will often happen. However, concrete questions concerning the stakes at play are being multiplied by the number of Member States, the different situations require solutions that do not regularly put one or other of the different groups of countries in a minority, and every country has to make an effort to take into account the interests of its neighbour. National elections are coming (we're always voting in one or other of the different countries) and they produce shifts in government majorities, often in the opposite direction, although at the European level the pre-eminence of one or other of the radical ideologies does not reflect the political reality of the Union. Resorting to compromise is therefore sometimes inevitable, without impinging on, obviously, the major principles or the substance of the single market. Parliament's increasing power is becoming an essential element in finding a compromise. We saw this in the services dossier: it's Parliament that defined the middle-way between opposing ideologies. If we add the benefits represented by the tradition of getting to know, evaluate and discuss the positions of others, the “Community method” therefore proves once again its validity, with the Commission proposing on behalf of the common interest, ensuring respect for the rules of the game, together with Parliament and the Council, which share the power of decision-making, and exercise this power taking into account the different views.
An absolute requirement. I will not be writing a lengthy epilogue on the contents of the results achieved on the above-mentioned dossiers, I'll highlight the significance of them instead. The agreement on the new financial perspectives was an absolute necessity, because we were getting dangerously close to the deadline, after which any Community activity would have been blocked. The European Parliament waged a good war, using the threat of bringing the EU down to a system of annual budgetary procedures alone. But this was not in fact a valid solution. Europe would have had the necessary money and powers to make its institutions and the agricultural policy work but without the legal means of financing structural support for new Member States or re-launching essential factors in the Lisbon Strategy (research, innovation, Trans-European Networks, etc.) What Parliament succeeded in snatching in the final negotiation is all to the good of future European activity, and the extension of flexibility is an important achievement too. Parliamentary negotiators therefore were right to fight almost to the limit of bluffing (in the sense that the rejection of the agreement would have cost Europe too dearly to be tenable). But we cannot ignore the fact that it was the national parliamentarians who voted definitively for the Union's financial envelope, via the intermediary of the national budgets. The European political parties, such as the European People's Party (EPP) and the Party of European Socialists (PES) should have tried to harmonise the positions of the national parliamentarians (restrictive) and the European parliamentarians (making the demands), with a view to making the orientations of some Heads of government more flexible. This did not prove possible because some national parliaments (the Netherlands and Germany, for example) would not have agreed to the increase in national contributions and the contrast with other net country contributors and beneficiaries would have been heightened. Political realities should be taken into account and we should recognise that the new financial perspectives are not as bad as sometimes they are made out to be. Of course there are shortcomings but they have enough resources to reasonably support the new Member States and new European policies, and they are worthwhile.
A dossier that's still pending. It was Parliament who succeeded in getting the new services directive through. Those against it should accept the democratic rules of the game and not forget that a fracture was opening up between the old and new Member States and between different political forces. The compromise gets rid of some controversial ideological concepts (the notion of the country of origin), bereft of any justification, the lies used by France and adversaries of the Constitution, consolidates the role of the services of general interest as one of the pillars of the European societal model and will further open up the borders without compromising the social aquis. Many aspects are still pending, particularly in relation to the Services of General Economic Interest (SGEI), for which other drafts (and other battles) will be necessary. (F.R.)