Ambitions of Future Europe
To all appearances the EU officials have understood that only a new form of governing the unique EU community will make it possible to ride out the lingering crisis. Proof of this is a number of recent statements made by EU leaders and high-ranking officials from EU member states.
In particular, recently the President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso delivered a speech on the state of affairs in Europe to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in which he called for a federation of the national states of Europe. “Before the next European Parliament elections in 2014, the Commission will present its outline for the shape of the future European Union. And we will put forward explicit ideas for Treaty change in time for a debate,” Barroso said.
And on September 18 a group of 11 ministers of foreign affairs of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Spain after the meeting in Warsaw outlined their recommendations in the Final Report of the Future of Europe Group. The ministers consider it reasonable to give more power to a High EU Representative on External Policy and at the same time reduce the general powers of EU capitals.
Incidentally, on the same day ministers of foreign affairs of Poland and Germany, Radoslaw Sikorski and Guido Westerwelle, published an article in The New York Times with a title “A New Vision of Europe.” “Our ambition is to ensure that Europe plays a global role that corresponds to its economic power. We refuse to allow the EU to be, in the words of a former Belgian minister of foreign affairs, Mark Eyskens, ‘a political dwarf and a military worm,’” the ministers emphasized.
A more detailed vision of future Europe is described in the abovementioned communique. In particular, it stresses that the European External Action Service (EEAS) should be substancially revised, the EEAS chief in charge of neighborhood and development policy should be appointed and a new-model defense policy should be developed to create a “European army.” The current EEAS chief, Catherine Ashton serves her duties in coordination with the neighborhood commissioner Stefan Fuele and development commissioner Andris Piebalgs, who control the vast share of EU money spent in the Western Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa. According to the new model of the EEAS, its chief will control two “junior” neighborhood and aid commissioners.
The communique also calls for more meetings of EU foreign ministers and more majority-based decisions in the sphere of foreign and defense policy in order to prevent one member state from being able to block the initiatives.
The idea of reducing powers of EU capitals was the main topic of the report. The authors consider that in future the changes to EU treaties will be approved by the majority of the EU member states and their population, not by unanimity.
The ministers also approved the existing legal proposals to give the European Commission and European Central Bank more control over national economies: the so-called “two-pack” law on budgetary discipline and a single EU bank supervisor.
The authors of the report have suggested the idea of a single EU president to run European Commission and the EU Council and be elected by the voters in an all-EU voting “on the same day in all member states.” “At the end of a long process, a more streamlined and efficient system for the separation of powers in Europe which enjoys full democratic legitimacy should be envisaged. For some members of the Group, this could include a directly elected Commission President who personally appoints the members of his ‘European Government,’ a European Parliament with the powers to initiate legislation and a second chamber for the member states,” the ministers emphasized. They have also proposed that the EU external borders be guarded by a “European Border Police.”
The communique makes it clear several times that “not all the ministers who took part in the meeting agree with all the proposals.” And this leaves an opportunity for some countries to backpedal from the abovementioned proposals in case there will be a strong eurosceptic reaction in their homeland. The ministers also emphasized that the changes to the EU agreements approved by the majority of votes will be obligatory only for those EU member countries who have ratified them and “the responsibility of the member states for the composition of their budgets has to be fully respected.”
