THE DRAFT TREATY ESTABLISHING THE EUROPEAN UNION
by Altiero Spinelli
SUMMARY: In this debate and the vote following it the European Parliament performs the most important act of its short history as a European democratic Assembly, bringing to a conclusion the action initiated by Spinelli on 2 5 June 1980 and continued by the foundation - on 9 July - of the Crocodile Club.
Following up the resolution approved on 14 September 1983, the Committee on Institutional Affairs transformed the content of the resolution into the articles of a Treaty. A committee of 4 jurists, Francesco Capotorti, Meinhard Hilf, Francis Jacobs and Jean Paul Jacqué, ensured that the treaty was legally sound. The legal accuracy of the language in the Dutch, Danish and Greek versions was also ensured by Hans Nord (Liberal Member), Peters Vesterdorf (Danish lawyer) and Dimitris Evrigenis (Greek lawyer and Member of the European Parliament since June 1984).
On 13 December 1983 the Committee on Institutional Affairs approves the draft Treaty by 31 votes in favour and 2 against. In "Speeches in European Parliament, 1976-1986", Pier Virgilio Dastoli editor. (EP, 14 February 1984)
Mr President, honourable colleagues, the Committee on Institutional Affairs has completed the task which this Parliament entrusted to it. Today I have the honour of asking you on its behalf to approve the resolution containing the draft treaty establishing the European Union.
Before I proceed, let me draw your attention to the fact that one line has been removed from the explanatory statement. It referred to the very first text in which the subject of institutional reform was raised, the Van Aerssen motion for a resolution of September 1979. The missing line will be restored.
I should just like to make a preliminary comment on the amendments you are being asked to vote on. One group of amendments are stylistic corrections which the committee do not have time to incorporate into the text and which it asks you to approve. A second group are amendments which put to the House substitute formulae already considered and rejected by the committee. We must ask you to reject these, for they seek to modify texts which are the result of often complex and delicate compromises which it would be unwise to tamper with. Since we should all be aware that to produce this draft meant marrying ideas of different parentage, I shall ask the authors of the amendments to withdraw them.
The last category is amendments containing some new ideas or nuances. The committee proposes that the House adopt these or, if not, an acceptable compromise amendment which does not alter the meaning of the article. These amendments include some relating to Article 82 of the treaty and paragraphs 2 and 3 of the resolution, the acceptance or rejection of which will affect the whole political significance of the draft treaty. I shall be speaking of these shortly.
I come to the central theme of our debate, which, since it is the fourth to be devoted here to this subject, will no doubt concentrate on the essential aspect which I wish to define in the following way: today, in this House, the European Parliament must explain firmly and clearly the political reasons for our proposal. It must explain them to itself, to the governments and parliaments of the Member States, to the parties, to the social groupings and, above all, to our citizens in whose hands in four months time we shall be placing the mandate for which we canvassed five years ago. It is to the clarity and firmness of that explanation that I want to contribute with this introduction to the debate.
Our proposal for institutional reform and the Genscher-Colombo Plan came into being at almost the same time a little over two years ago and have a great deal in common. Both stem from recognition of the contradiction between the growing need for European unity and the obvious danger that it might not merely fail to develop, but actually regress. Both projects express the view that the fundamental reason for this crisis is that the objectives to be achieved are too narrowly defined and the way in which the Community operates is inefficient. Both projects, therefore, focus on institutional reform. They are alike, too, in reflecting their authors' acute awareness that results can be achieved only by a compromise between those engaged in the search for a solution.
However, the methods used in the two approaches to the problem have been very different. The negotiators of the Genscher-Colombo Plan, ministers and diplomats, derived their legitimacy from their capacity as State representatives as such. Although they were aware that they were dealing with problems of Community significance and dimension, they were all bound by the nature of their institutional position to see things primarily from the national point of view. In the case of our project we derived our legitimacy from our role as the elected representatives of the Community's citizens, as the most authentic trustees of nascent European democracy. Coming as we do from the political and social life of our countries, we are all conscious of the need to take the problems of our respective countries into account. But our institutional task is to see things first and foremost from the European standpoint. We now know the results of these two different approaches. During the Genscher-Colombo Plan negotiations the na
tional perspective inevitably prevailed. European considerations gradually faded and the final declaration proposes in effect that inter-governmental action should be strengthened to the detriment of supranational action. In the course of the work on the draft on which we shall be voting this evening, far from becoming weaker the European aspect actually became clearer, surer, as the work progressed.
Our text makes the Commission into a genuine political executive and preserves a legislative and budgetary role for the Council of the Union. It recognizes that there are fields in which problems should be dealt with by the European Council by the method of cooperation. But it prohibits the intergovernmental method from encroaching on the sphere of common action and, at the same time, leaves a way open for certain matters to be transferred from the sphere of cooperation to that of common action. In one sense it has been providential that the Athens Council came between Stuttgart, where the Genscher-Colombo Plan was voted on, and Strasbourg, where we are voting today on the draft treaty. For the Genscher-Colombo Plan Athens was a real hic Rbodus, hic salta and it failed to make the crucial leap. It had proposed strengthening the inter-governmental method and Athens demonstrated the logical, never mind political impossibility of conceiving and carrying through by that method large-scale policies which need to
be pursued over a long period, to be based on broad consent and to overcome certain rigid national attitudes. But the disaster in Athens also showed unexpectedly what the previous Councils, despite their creeping paralysis, had managed to shield from public gaze.
For the first time, the Athens Council revealed that there was a real possibility that the union achieved in the Community could collapse and sacrosanct national egotism could return. Everyone feared the effects of such a collapse and began to look for a means of refloating the ship of Europe.
Our draft treaty could not have appeared on the political scene at a more opportune moment, for it is the only politically and intellectually valid reply to the failure in Athens. Our reply, like all true and genuine things, is both easy and hard to digest. It can be summed up in very few words: matters of common interest can be administered only by a genuinely common authority. Anyone who seriously desires to escape from the Athens impasse must support our project, but what a mass of taboos to overcome before people will see the truths staring them in the face!
Once approved, our draft treaty will not go to the Council, which would hand it over to the diplomatic representatives, who would dissect it and bury it. We shall deliver it to the national governments and parliaments, asking them to set in motion the ratification procedures.
The Committee on Institutional Affairs is recommending that Parliament follows this path principally for two complementary reasons. In the first place, this elected Parliament must be clearly and specifically conscious - and proud - of being the only European body in which the citizens of Europe as such are represented, in political groupings which are the same as those that exist in the national contexts. It follows that it is the only European body capable of drawing up a constitutional proposal without losing sight of the European perspective and with the participation of the political forces of all the Member States. In the second place, the national governments and parliaments are clearly aware of the need to push ahead with European integration and therefore to say yes or no to a scheme for Europe. But, if they sit down round a table in the persons of national ministers of parliamentary delegations to draft a text, the national reflexes of the individual minister or parliamentary delegation are inevita
bly triggered so that they automatically begin again to discuss things from the point of view of necessarily divergent national demands. Diplomatic negotiation would quickly predominate once more for reasons of national interest and the European Parliament's text would soon be reduced to a working document and eventually laid aside.
Of course we cannot rule out the possibility that our draft treaty will encounter such obstacles, that Parliament will have to take it back, put it on the last again, so to speak, and reshape it. But let us wait and see before deciding to do that. Let us be careful not to demote our proposal now from the level of an official project from the only political assembly qualified to propose a text on European institutional reform to the level of a working document humbly submitted by a Parliament unsure of its right to draft it.
I have dwelt on this aspect of our proposal which is referred to in paragraphs 2 and 3 of the resolution and in the compromise amendment which our committee is recommending for approval because the effect of the Haagerup-Nord amendment would be illogical in precisely the way I have been trying to indicate. If this amendment were approved, we would ourselves have declared that we are incapable of presenting a viable project. Probably some of us, I for one, would feel rather ashamed to set foot again in a Parliament capable of such an act of self-mutilation and self-ridicule. We shall, therefore, I hope, decide to address ourselves to the governments and parliaments of the Member States to ask them to take over and approve the project.
That is when the real battle for the Union will begin and the European Parliament's role will continue to be vital, for it will have to direct and inspire a difficult and exacting operation which cannot succeed unless we learn to be singleminded.
Our political groups will be asked to exert all the influence they can on their parties and thereby on their related political groups in the national parliaments. We shall explain and publicize our draft treaty during the next election campaign. We ask here and now that the next Parliament take all the necessary measures to overcome the obstacles and secure ratification.
I should like to draw your attention, too, to Article 82 and to the compromise amendment which refers to it and which the committee asks you to approve. The article says that unanimous ratification by the present Member States is not required for the Treaty to enter into force between those that do ratify it. It will then be for the latter to decide on the date and procedure for the entry into force of the Treaty and to negotiate new relations with the States which have not acceded. I draw your attention to the fact that such a quorum means that at least six States must have ratified the Treaty and seven in a Europe of Twelve; so the smaller States will have a decisive say in the matter.
If we left any doubt as to whether a start could be made without the full number ratifying the Treaty, we should be putting the success of the enterprise into the hands not of those who are most decided, but of those States which are most hesitant, even potential opponents, condemning the entire undertaking to virtually certain failure.
Among the hesitant countries I am thinking - and I am not the only one to do so - of France, watching her with particular attention, anguish and apprehension because of the probably decisive impact which her response will have on all the other countries of the Community. The hesitation of many of our French colleagues in this House is a clear indication of serious hesitation among the leaders of their country.
Once again, it is almost providential that France holds the Presidency of the Council in this first half of 1984, which starts with today's vote on the draft treaty of the Union and will end with the European elections. Of course no one can expect all the accumulated damage of the Athens fiasco and long before to be made good during these months, but we are entitled to expect that the way in which they can be redressed might be discovered and mapped out.
The French Presidency is, therefore, under an obligation during these six months to ponder the crisis in Europe and ways of dealing with it with greater intensity and more imagination than in past years. We should, I believe, advise it not to expect much from the bilateral meetings it is so keen on.
To be sure, it is possible, even likely, that a series of compromises of a short-term nature will be found during these meetings, but one can bet on it that they will be bad compromises, because they will put off the institutional crisis for a year or two, when it will explode all the more dangerously for having been deferred.
Useful though they may be for specific limited agreements inter-governmental negotiations are bound to produce bad compromises, when what is needed is a large-scale, lasting policy.
Our Parliament must, with this evening's vote, say to all the people of France, but above all to the President of the Republic, who recently appealed for a return to the spirit of the Congress of The Hague and spoke of the need to achieve political unity, that we took to the French. Presidency of the Council to do more than come and speak to us in ritual fashion, at the end of its half-year, of the Council's trifling achievements during that period; instead we expect it to recognize that our proposal is the reply, the only viable reply to the life-anddeath challenge facing Europe and, with it, France, and we look to the French Government - I really do mean the French Government, not the European Council - to adopt the draft treaty and to announce that it is prepared to begin the ratification procedure as soon as the minimum member of countries required by the Treaty for its entry into force have similarly committed themselves.
In that case, these six months of the French Presidency would go down in history.
In conclusion, on behalf of the Committee on Institutional Affairs, I ask the House to vote massively for the committee's resolution and the amendments which it is recommending.
