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Journal of International Relations and Development
The Council and Enlargement: A Challenge or an Opportunity?
by Fiona Hayes-Renshaw
*
WHEN THE EUROPEAN UNION'S FORTHCOMING ENLARGEMENT IS MENTIONED TODAY, IT IS INCREASINGLY ACCOMPANIED BY THE WORD "CHALLENGE", IMPLYING A THREAT TO, OR A CALLING INTO QUESTION OF, THE SYSTEM. The Council of Ministers has been singled out by some observers as the venue where the scale and intensity of this challenge will be particularly great. The implication is that the Council will be found wanting, indeed that enlargement may well spell disaster for the EU's main decision-making body, and consequently for the EU as a whole. The unprecedented increase in numbers, so the argument goes, coupled with more diverging interests, will make discussion slower, decisions more difficult and management more complex.
Enlargement has always necessitated adjustment, both in terms of socialisation of new and old members alike, and in terms of adapting the working methods, systems and structures to cope with and include the larger numbers. The Council which today serves the European Union of Fifteen is basically the same body created fifty years ago for the European Community of Six. With each successive enlargement, the basic design has been expanded to allow for the increased numbers, and this pattern will be followed again over the next few years. However, the chief difficulties which the Council will face in the wake of the Eastern enlargement will not be caused by the increased numbers, for the simple reason that the shortcomings from which these difficulties arise have existed for many years. Enlargement will merely exacerbate the problems which the Council already faces today, and which need to be dealt with in a much more systematic and definitive fashion than heretofore. The forthcoming enlargement should therefore be viewed not as a negative challenge but as a positive opportunity to deal with a number of problem areas that have been adversely affecting the work of the Council for many years.
Every enlargement entails a certain number of unavoidable adjustments of a physical or operational nature, and this will also be the case with the forthcoming Eastern enlargement. Meeting rooms will have to be adapted to cope with the increased numbers (places at the tables, interpretation booths), and a delegation office will have to be provided in the Justus Lipsius building for each new entrant. More copies of documents will have to be provided for each meeting, new translators will have to be hired, and officials from the new member-states will have to be recruited to the Council Secretariat. The rotation of the Presidency will have to be adapted to take account of the new members, as will the thresholds for achieving a qualified majority and a blocking minority. Such adjustments may appear mundane, but their smooth implementation will ensure the seamless continuation of the work of the Council while adapting to cope with increased membership.
At the same time as it is preparing to tackle these unavoidable adjustments necessitated by every enlargement, the Council faces a number of other areas where change is required if it is to continue to operate smoothly. The questions of voting and language are of particular importance, but they are being dealt with in completely different ways. Discussing the re-weighting of votes in the Council was always going to be delicate, but doing so in a year-long Intergovernmental Conference has not only prolonged the agony, but also ensured that the debate has taken place in the open: increased access to documents has meant that interested members of the public have been able to follow the course of the debate closely, including the alternative proposals tabled to deal with the problem.
The vexed question of language has had a much lower profile. Like a monster which rears its ugly head from time to time, it has flared up on various occasions and been beaten into temporary submission, but nobody has yet managed to ensure its final demise. Officials in the Council Secretariat and the Presidency, who do battle with the monster on a daily basis, are unanimous in declaring that "something must be done" to simplify their task, particularly in the light of the imminent enlargement. Unfortunately, the solution lies with the politicians in the member-states, who are responsible for having created the monster in the first place, and some of them are determined to keep it alive. New members will have the effect of increasing the size and appetite of the beast, which is why behind-the-scene discussions are taking place to try to shrink it to manageable proportions before enlargement occurs.
Reform has been a buzzword in the EU since the infamous collapse of the Santer Commission in March 1999, and the Council has done its share of navel-gazing. The Cologne European Council of June 1999 called for specific proposals to be put forward, aimed at improving the operation of the Council with a view to enlargement. The Helsinki European Council of December 1999 included Guidelines for Reform and Operational Recommendations for An Effective Council for an Enlarged Union, which drew on the exhaustive Trumpf-Piris Report, which had been prepared by the Secretary General of the Council and the head of its legal service and published in March 1999; the Council's internal rules of procedure were modified in June 2000 to take account of changes in its organisation and working methods, and decisions were adopted on the number of Council formations and public access to military documents (in June and August 2000, respectively). The Council's working methods have never been subjected to such close scrutiny before, nor has so much thought and time been put into the means for improving them.
The Council's persistent shortcomings have been brought into sharper relief in recent years because of the rapid and extensive expansion of its activities. Critics of the Council point to instances of sluggish decision-making, lengthy debates, a lack of co-ordination (and therefore of consistency) between its many formations, and a general lack of transparency in its operation. In addition, it is claimed, the General Affairs Council is not fulfilling its role adequately, and the Council as a whole is being squeezed between an increasingly influential COREPER, and a European Council which (because of the aforementioned lack of co-ordination between Councils) focuses on operational and legislative problems rather than on strategic leadership.
Various solutions to the above problems have been posited. As regards delays in decision-making, it has been suggested that an extension of qualified majority voting would speed-up the process. However, insiders estimate already that 85% of decisions subject to a vote are actually agreed by consensus (i.e. a vote is not called), which suggests that attention should also be focused on improving the process of negotiation. The extension of the scope of the co-decision procedure also means that such negotiations now take place not only within the Council, but also between the Council and the European Parliament, although it appears that the procedure has been working well, due to extensive co-operation between the Council and the Parliament at all levels.
When negotiating within the Council, the representatives of each member-state articulate and defend their own position on every issue on the agenda before them. With increased numbers of participants and of agenda items, the question of time obviously becomes crucial. The death knell has been sounded for the tour de table at the beginning of each discussion, where each member-state representative is allowed to state his or her position on the issue being discussed. In future, national delegations will be encouraged to put their positions in writing, or to liase with like-minded delegations in advance of the meeting, with one of them speaking on behalf of the group. In this way, it is hoped that the already limited time available to ministers and officials alike will be put to the best possible use at all levels of the Council hierarchy.
A general lack of co-ordination (and therefore of consistency) within and between the various Council formations has been noted and criticised for some time. The European Council, the rotating Presidency, the Council Secretariat and COREPER have individually and collectively tried to fill the gap created by the abject failure of the General Affairs Council to fulfil the co-ordinating task assigned to it by the Treaties. Alternatives have been suggested – a Council composed of Minsters for Europe (although such posts do not exist in every member-state), a new, more senior level of COREPER (but enthusiasm for such a body has been notably muted), changing the duration of the presidency – but recourse has been made for the present to dividing the General Affairs Council agenda into two distinct parts (Foreign Affairs and General Affairs), and exhorting the member-states to 'ensure that they are suitably represented at ministerial level at both parts of the session'. In addition, it was hoped that, by officially reducing the number of Council formations to 15 (in practice 16 – a typical EU outcome!), the task of co-ordination would be simplified.
Transparency has never been a word which springs to mind when discussing the work of the Council, but the ministers have been forced to deal with the question in recent years and improve their poor record. Real progress has been made in the area of public access to documents, although resistance from within the Council was initially strong, as ingrained habits proved difficult to change. Today, more than 87 percent of all documents requested are made available, and many of these relate to the second and third pillars. The Council has created its own website, which contains an up-to-date register of documents, as well as agendas of meetings taking place, the numbers of relevant documents, press releases, voting records and explanations of vote. While the information provided still falls a long way short of what is desired by those who criticise the Council for holding its deliberations behind closed doors, the real progress which has been made in terms of the provision of information should not be underestimated.
The Council's ability as an enlarged body to deal with the large numbers of issues facing it across the three pillars and in the new areas of co-operation introduced under the Treaty of Amsterdam is still open to question. The aforementioned lack of co-ordination between Councils has turned the European Council into a type of court of final instance, settling disputes between sectoral Councils rather than concentrating on strategic leadership, as was the original intention. At the other end of the scale, COREPER and the working groups have taken on important decision-shaping functions, basically pre-figuring the discussions of the ministers in Council. Such developments should not surprise us, since busy national ministers cannot be expected to spend the time required to negotiate the detailed legislation emanating from the EU today in an ever-increasing number of areas.
Concerns have also been voiced about implementation of the new flexibility clauses, as well as excursions into the uncharted intergovernmental waters of the second and third pillars, particularly the fledgling Common European Security and Defence Policy, under the stewardship of the newly-appointed High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. The objective for the future surely lies in ensuring effective internal co-ordination in and between each of the member-states, as well as improving co-ordination between them and the other EU institutions at all levels. In this way, the Council will be empowered to continue to fulfil its central role in an enlarged Union – an opportunity, surely, rather than a challenge?
February 2001
Endnotes
Note *:
Fiona Hayes-Renshaw is Professor of Political Science at the College of Europe, Natolin, ul. Nowoursynowska 84, Box 120, PL-02/797 Warszawa 78, Poland. E-mail: fionahrenshaw@compuserve.com
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