Brussels, 27/11/2007 (Agence Europe) - The EU Reform Treaty, otherwise known as the Lisbon Treaty, will be signed on 13 December 2007 and will probably be ratified without too many problems, but the practical implementation of some of its institutional innovations may prove more problematic. These potential problems have been studied by the Centre of European Policy Studies (CEPS), the Institut Royal des Relations Internationales (Egmont) and the European Policy Centre (EPC) in a joint study entitled 'The Treaty of Lisbon: Implementing the Institutional Innovations.' The study examines the process of applying the institutional innovations in seven domains: the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council presidency, qualified majority voting at the Council, national parliaments, strengthened cooperation and foreign policy.
At the official presentation of the study in Brussels on Monday 26 November, three of the co-authors - Philippe de Schoutheete (Egmont), Sebastian Kurpas (CEPS) and Antonio Missiroli (EPC) - outlined some of the possible areas of friction. For example, the lack of clear limits to the powers of the three leading figureheads of the EU in the future, namely the permanent president of the European Council, the president of the European Commission and the high representative (HR) for the CFSP. Without close cooperation (which will depend to a huge extent on the actual personality of the figures chosen for the posts), the coexistence of this EU 'troika' risks causing tension and complicating the functioning of the EU, particularly in terms of foreign policy, especially because the treaty does not specify the structure or powers of the EU's future diplomatic service which is supposed to be made up of Council, Commission and member states' diplomats. Another predicted problem is reducing the number of commissioners to 2/3 of the number of member states from 2014 onwards. The treaty foresees that the commissioners should be determined by fair rotation among member states, respecting the EU's geographical and demographic balance, but the nitty gritty of the rotation system will have to be decided by the Council by unanimous vote.
The research can be downloaded at http://www.ceps.eu or http://www.irri-kiib.be (H.B.)