Lisbon Speech, Tepsa Presidency Conference

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SPEECH
Lisbon, Thursday 11 November 1999

TEPSA PRESIDENCY CONFERENCE

Speech by Andrew Duff MEP, Constitutional Affairs Spokesman of the European Liberal Democrats

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure to be asked by the Instituto de Estudos Estrategicos e Internacionias to give the keynote contribution from TEPSA to this important pre-presidency conference.

It is 'pre-presidency' by about six weeks - give or take a few days for the Millennium celebrations (and a few more days for recovery from them).

These six weeks will not seem a very long time to the ministers and officials who have been working hard for many months to get the Portuguese machine into an advanced stage of preparedness. This time your preparations have been complicated by the recent general election. But at least you have been sensible enough to get the electoral campaign and the reorganisation of the government out of the way before you assume the Council presidency - and will thus avoid some of the domestic political problems that have beset so many recent terms of office of Council presidencies in other member states.

Portugal will take over from a very efficient and very well prepared presidency of Finland - possibly even over-prepared! The Helsinki European Council looks set to be, like Tampere, one of the more productive summits in recent times. You have a reformist European Commission now firmly in place; and (if I may say so) a rejuvenated European Parliament to be your interlocutor on the European scale.

It is the prime task of the Commission of Mr Prodi to set the work programme for the EU institutions not only for the next six months but also for the next five years. It is the job of the presidency to coordinate the Council's response to the Commission's initiatives, to help manage crises, and to share in the representation of the Union in world affairs. The presidency has a modest but vital role, and it is the passage from one presidency to another that allows TEPSA and its friends to confer upon the state of the Union, and to learn from the incoming presidency about its European priorities, anxieties and aspirations.

What, then, moves Portuguese European policy today? The main items of the EU's current agenda must include:

the IGC and its two parallel exercises, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the negotiations to settle Europe's arrangements in the field of defence;

the Millennium Round of the World Trade Organisation;

enlargement;

the quest for a European social model;

continued, and even spreading instability and danger in Eastern Europe.

There will certainly be other things that blow in suddenly from home and abroad to confuse and distract this presidency, as all presidencies, from its best-laid plans.

There may also be matters of special concern to Portugal, and we will learn about them during our stay in Lisbon. It is possible that, for each presidency in turn, the temptation is to try to put a national stamp on the work of the Union. In my experience, these national orientations - sometimes, even obsessions - usually fail.

For the outgoing Finnish presidency, the special priority was the so-called 'Northern Dimension'. The outcome here has not been especially or self-evidently fruitful, largely because of the inherent problematics of the Baltic region as well as the relative indifference of other member states to concentration on one region. But the Northern Dimension has required of the Finns much extra work and justification.

Portugal's equivalent would be the Mediterranean. Here, fortunately, the better prospects of peace in Palestine should at least allow some progress to be made. The Barcelona process may now escape from virtual imprisonment by the Middle East crisis.

The IGC

Perhaps the greatest test of the presidency will be the conduct of the new Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) to change once again the foundation Treaties of the European Union. The role of the presidency cannot be underestimated at such conferences: a strong presidency can be very effective in forcing the pace of change; a weak Commission, by contrast can be completely marginalised in the process. The most successful IGCs have been run by presidencies who are not themselves significant demandeurs - a happy condition which, I think, will prevail for Portugal.

It is vital to recognise, and to keep in mind, that there is a link between improving the public policy that flows out of Brussels on the one hand and structural reform of the system of government of the Union on the other. Indeed, that is why we must endure another IGC: so that the citizen will see that European integration really is worth all the effort; that prosperity and security can be extended through greater solidarity between Europe's states and their peoples; and that the EU Treaty is the fundamental pact that forms the ties that bind.

I hope that Portugal therefore can be expected to be a strong proponent of the concept of EU citizenship, and that it will seek to progress the drafting of the new Charter of Fundamental Rights so that the finished product, in December 2000, can be really meaningful - and, indeed, mandatory upon the EU institutions and member states in the implementation of EU law and policy. The Charter will need somehow to be written in to the revised Treaties. The IGC must leave a space for the enhanced citizenship rights, and the linkage between the drafting of the Charter and the negotiation of the IGC must be established and maintained.

Flowing directly from a decent Citizens' Charter is one of two key decisions - one radical and one conservative - of the IGC.

I refer to the need to widen the category of potential litigants before the European Court of Justice (ECJ). If the Charter is to be justiciable, every citizen must be granted direct right of access to the ECJ under a revised Article 173. Such a radical reform will ensure that the Luxembourg Court develops jurisprudence in civil liberties questions. Healthy competition with the Council of EuropeÕs Court at Strasbourg will create circumstances in which the citizen can choose the best, quickest and cheapest form of litigation.

Conflict between the two Courts could be reduced if the EU as a whole were to adopt legal personality and sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights. As co-rapporteur of the Parliament on the Charter, I have to say, I favour such a dual track approach.

An ancillary but attractive consequence of the extended access to the ECJ would be that pressure groups and NGOs would have the incentive to scrutinise much more rigorously the delegated legislation coming out of the nexus of comitology because they would have the ability to seek judicial review if necessary. Speaking as an over-worked and under-paid European Parliamentarian, I can say how welcome this assistance to us would be.

A third category that should benefit from a widening class of privileged litigants in the ECJ must be member state (and in federal republics, regional) parliaments. This would allow national MPs to seek redress in Luxembourg on the grounds of ultra vires. For too long national parliaments have grumbled about European integration without doing much about it. Give national parliaments the power to challenge breaches of the principle of subsidiarity by the EU institutions, and they would have to put up or shut up.

My second key reform, and this a conservative one, is to entrench the constitutional elements of the Treaty in a first part of the Treaty that would be amendable in future only with extreme difficulty. Unanimity plus national ratification should continue to apply to those articles of the Treaty that state its values, set out its objectives, describe its decision-making procedures and establish citizensÕ rights. Included in this category of constitutional articles would be those concerning the financial system of the Union, accession and secession, as well as the accretion of more competence by the EU institutions (Article 235).

A second part of the Treaty would contain the chapters concerning policy implementation, on transport and employment and so on. These articles would be amendable by a softer procedure, involving the European Parliament but without ponderous and protracted member state ratification.

It is important to recognise that in a Union of 25 member states Treaty amendment, even on small matters, will be very much more problematical than it is now. We have to be build in more flexibility now if we are to avoid paralysis at some time in the future. That is why a reform of Article 48 at this IGC is essential.

The first part of this constitutionalisation process - the entrenchment - should serve to reassure those people who fear a creeping loss of national sovereignty to Europe. (I know there are some of these people even in Portugal.) The second part of the Treaty reform - introducing the more flexible method - should enliven the political debate at the EU level, offering the public the prospect of real choice, and stimulating the need for forceful representation within the institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg. Both parts of the reform would contribute to the development of the parliamentary Europe that I and my colleagues are keen to see.

We are discussing the IGC in more detail later in the conference, so I will say no more here. Apart from defence.

In defence policy we are on the brink of a brave new world. The old and fairly sterile campaign to establish a European security and defence identity is nearing its end, not because of interminable academic argument but because of the exercise of military power we saw above the skies and then on the ground in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosova. I have always seen Mr Milosevich as a throwback to the Second World War, EuropeÕs last fascist dictator. It may be unfortunate that we had to go back fifty years later to the unfinished business of 1945 - but it has certainly spawned the radical review we needed of our mutual defence arrangements.

The IGC will have to draw the right conclusions from this experience, NATO's first at fighting a real war. The negotiations, led by the UK and France, yet continue, and there are still ambiguities in the position of both London and Paris. Portugal is no stranger to transatlantic relations, and as a loyal but small member of NATO it can contribute effectively as EU Council president-in-office to the resolution of these talks.

The TEPSA paper for this conference speaks of the European Union as being the 'natural organiser of a European security structure within NATO'. I think that is broadly right, although I would argue for a separate pillar under the Treaty - a European Defence Community - whose membership is wholly voluntary. This implies a clean break with the theory of Maastricht that sought to lump common foreign and security policy together with defence. In my opinion, that connection was as false as the now disproved but once popular notion that the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System would lead ineluctably to a single currency.

The fact is that some EU countries do not want the Article 5 guarantee of collective defence. Such reticence has to be respected. Others in an enlarged Union may want it in theory but might not effectively contribute to it in practice. Such incapacity has to be overcome.

All current and future member states of the EU, however, should be able to participate fully in the Petersberg tasks and the common approach to foreign policy that underpins them. CFSP, stripped of its defence connotations, should continue to make the transition towards the first pillar.

Special Lisbon European Council

One of the least enviable tasks of the presidency is the special European Council in Lisbon on social policy matters. This will be marked by the efforts of Mr Blair to dissuade his partners from vain pursuit (as he would see it) of a single European social model and, instead, to embrace a new way towards social inclusion based on dynamic economic growth. The presidency will need to be very pragmatic, and even agile, in order to avoid a quarrel between the adherents of unreconstructed socialism and classical liberalism.

It would seem to me, as a witness to Portugal's structural reforms, and its enviable success at joining the euro, that it has much more to gain in letting Europe's different regions and varied tax regimes compete with each other rather than in forcing them to harmonise. If there is to be a model, let it be one where the internet is everywhere, where small firms are encouraged to take risks, where Europe's integrated capital markets has new opportunities to invest in infrastructure projects, where education and training is continually innovatory, and where the last remaining obstacles to the single market, especially in financial services, are removed. In these circumstances, Portugal's relative peripherality need not be a penalty: indeed, its lower labour costs will be turned to positive advantage.

And all Portugal's environmental sensibilities should be well to the fore in the negotiations about engines of growth, both in the domestic debate about a European 'third way', and also in the Millennium Round negotiations of the World Trade Organisation.

Welcome enlargement

It would be natural for a small country on the Western periphery of the EU to have reservations about the huge enlargement in prospect far to the East. This would be a mistake, because Portugal has enjoyed a huge advancement since its accession to the Union, and it would be churlish to seek to deny comparable advantages to others whose GDP is even lower in respect of the EU average than was Portugal's in 1974.

The problem is that enlargement means a much larger range of issues to deal with as well as more numerous partners. It will not be easy to make a success of this enlargement without a greater degree of differentiation between existing members states. The prospect of 'reinforced cooperation' among a solid core around Germany and France raised anxieties for the then Portuguese government at Amsterdam. It may do so if raised again. But Portugal's long international experience - witnessed this year so painfully in the trauma of East Timor and in the more decorous withdrawal from Macao - should ensure that a broader set of issues will be brought to bear upon the Portuguese stance as it presides over the Council's drive towards the accession of new members.

Studied neutrality on Graeco-Turkish matters, while remaining a good member of NATO, should also ease your relationship with a Turkey that is willing to follow your example and to modernise itself on the basis of its European and democratic traditions.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the sails are set fair for this latest European voyage of Portugal, and the ship is in good trim. On behalf of the European Parliament and of the Trans European Policy Studies Association I wish you all good luck as you leave port.

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