6. 1996 AND ALL THAT

Variable geometry, multi-track, multi-speed, V two-tier, hard core, concentric circles, A la carte, deepening, widening ... More than ever, Europe's politicians are mixing their metaphors.

The confusion stems from the part of the Maastricht treaty that calls for a conference of member states in 1996 "to examine those provisions of this Treaty for which revision is provided, in accordance with the objectives set out in Articles A and B." Those objectives are economic and monetary union, "ultimately including a single currency"; a common foreign and security policy, "which might in time lead to a common defence"; and "close cooperation on justice and home affairs".

These are big ambitions. The job of the 1996 intergovernmental conference is to correct any mistakes the Maastricht drafters may have made in the "process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe". Since there are some profound disagreements over what this union should mean, the 1996 debate could be extremely lively.

Why then has it started prematurely? The best explanation is that Germany, which now holds the six-month rotating presidency of the union, has a vision of an expanding, federalist Europe for which it feels that national electorates, and fellow governments, need to be prepared. After all, one lesson of the Maastricht process-shown by the wafer-thin referendum majority in France in 1992 and the need for Denmark to hold a second referendum in 1993 - is that Europe's leaders can easily misread the public mood. Even those who do not share Germany's vision will concede that some kind Of EU reform is inevitable.

Age limits

As presently constituted, the EU can barely cope with the present, let alone the future. Bear in mind that this is a club of unequals. Member states range from unified Germany, with 80m people, to tiny Luxembourg with a mere 395,000. They range in wealth from Denmark, with a GDP per head of over 21,000 ecus, to Greece, with about 7,500 ecus. Now look at three main institutions.

The commission is a body of permanent civil servants and government appointees which administers Eu business and proposes and drafts leg~ islation. The Council of Ministers, attended by appropriate government ministers from the member countries, is the EU'S legislature, the only one in the democratic world which normally deliberates in secret. The European Parliament, which holds its committee meetings in Brussels but its plenary sessions in Strasbourg, is the one Eu body directly elected by the union's citizens and yet has few of the powers of any national parliament and counts for less than either the council or the commission.

This structure was designed for a club of six, and it has just about coped with the doubling to 12. But how can it deal, the rule-book unchanged, with a club that in the next two decades could expand to a membership of a score or more?

The bigger the club, the tougher it will be to maintain an acceptable balance between large countries and small. Of the six founding members, France, West Germany and Italy had big populations; Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg small ones. Today the big members have been joined by Britain, with Spain close behind, and the small countries have been bolstered by Ireland, Denmark, Greece and Portugal. Harmony of sorts is maintained by a system of checks and balances: big countries have more votes in the Council of Ministers so that they cannot be out-voted by a gaggle of small ones. in turn, small countries are protected by a system of weighted voting. Of the council's 76 votes, 54 are currently needed to form a "qualified", or decisive, majority-and only 23 are therefore needed to form a blocking minority.

So far, so good. The present arithmetic means that the big five, with 48 votes between them and representing four-fifths of the union's population, can muster a qualified majority only if they gain the support of at least two small states. Similarly, to get their way the small states need the backing of three big states. Conversely, two big countries can form a blocking minority if they can get the support of any small country other than Luxembourg. Roughly speaking, a qualified majority normally represents 70% of the EU'S people, a blocking minority 30%.

The problem is the future. From January 1st the EU is supposed to grow, by four more countries, to 16 members. Extend the arithmetic and the qualified majority will go up to 64 votes out of 90 (see table 6); and the blocking minority to 27. By John Major's pocket calculator that means that Britain, Germany and Holland, a liberal economic group, would be unable to form a blocking minority against illiberal nonsense even though they would represent over 40% of the union's population. By contrast, eight small countries could gang together and get 27 votes even though they represent only 12% of the European Union's people.

Viewing this as an unacceptable shift in the union's balance, Britain threatened until last March to hold up the accession treaties with the applicant countries. Then a compromise was reached: if two big countries wanting to block a decision could not gather the 27 votes needed, fellow members would try for a "reasonable" period to reach a compromise acceptable to them.

The British have a point-it is already bizarre that Germa should have only one council vote more of the unanimity still needed for such areas as taxation and foreign policy-and for the revision of the treaties and the acceptance of new members. I on the other hand, no club can be happy if some members are constantly overruled, especially if it is a club of conflicting interests and rival cultures. And that it surely is. Some members, such as Germany, Holland, Denmark and Britain, instinctively believe in free trade and open markets; others, such as France and Spain, mistrust market forces that they cannot influence. Some, notably Germany and Britain, put into the communal budget far more than they get out, while others, especially Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, do the reverse (see chart 7 on next page). There are plenty of what John Major once called "fault lines" to threaten the union's solidity.

Speed limits

Up to now the union has tried to finesse such differences. That is why the Maastricht treaty deals with the single market, economic affairs and trade relations as communal matters to be supervised by the commission, but decrees that a common foreign and security policy, along with justice and home affairs, are matters to be settled between governments. This enables France and Britain, the two countries with lingering imperial responsibilities and also the will, tradition and - just about - the means to project military force around the world, to keep control of their foreign interests. Similarly, Germany, which is particularly sensitive about immigration, can more easily ignore the liberal attitudes of the commission and the parliament.

Yet it is unlikely that intergovernmentalism, the practice of leaving tricky decisions for agreement among individual member governments, can provide a perfect solution. René Foch, secretaty-general of a lobbying group, the Comité d'Action pour l'Europe, argues that there are at least three weaknesses. One is inefficiency: since 1985 nine EU states-all except Britain, Ireland and Denmarkhave signed the Schengen agreement to abolish all passport checks and other obstacles to the free movement within the EU Of its citizens. And yet they have still not fully implemented the agreement. By contrast, the single market, achieved on a community basis and by qualified-majority voting, is up and (mainly) running.

The second failing is that intergovernmentalism can increase the "democratic deficit"-the extent to which Eu affairs are decided outside the direct control of elected representatives. Mr Foch cites the example of Europol, the body set up this year to foster co-operation among the union's police forces: it is specifically excluded by the Maastricht treaty from supervision by the parliament and the European Court, but in reality is also beyond the supervision of national parliaments.

Lastly, intergovernmentalism does not fill in any fault lines, it merely papers them over. The theory is that all participants in intergovernmental organisations are equal - but the practice, from the United Nations down, is that some are more equal than others and a few may be dominant. As the EU expands, so the inequities will tend to worsen. "However democratic the new Germany may be", says Mr Foch, "its sheer size and position in the for every sm people while Luxembourg has one for every 198,000 - and the point will grow more obvious if tiddlers such as Malta and Cyprus join the union. But, in practice, council meetings tend to be bazaar-like bargaining sessions in which calculators are seldom needed. Of some 233 single-market decisions taken in the five years to last December only 91 actually went to a vote. The implicit message of Britain's obduracy was that it is more important to be able to block legislation than to pass it.

Is such an attitude sustainable in an expanding union? True followers of Monnet would say that no minority should be allowed to paralyse the European process. The concept of majority voting was in the original Treaty of Rome and was put into effect for all legislation affecting the single market. The aim must surely be to increase the scope for majority voting, not to go backwards towards heart of Europe would inexorably lead it - without seeking any such role and even against its will - to dominate a merely intergovernmental Europe.

Mrs Thatcher's answer to that problem was to declare that only the military and political engagemerit of the United States in Europe, and close relations between the other two strongest sovereign states in the region - Britain and France - could balance German power. She went on to argue that no such balancing arrangements could be achieved within a European super-state. That, however, depends on how you design your super-state.

Pick the metaphor

There are two kinds of design problem here. The first concerns the structure ofthe institutions. There are now 17 commissioners (two each for the five big countries, one each for the small ones), whose pronouncements have to be translated into nine official languages. if the union grows to 16 members on January 1st there will be 21 commissioners and 12 official languages (the Austrians speak German, which is already an official EU tongue); parliament will increase from 567 to 641 members; the European Court of justice from 13 judges to 17.

And so it goes on ... but not indefinitely. Before the union gets bigger still there will have to be a decision at the 1996 conference to have either a smaller commission, or one in which some commissioners are junior to others. Big countries, for example, could have one commissioner each; small countries could take turns to have a commissioner.

That will cause quarrels enough. So will the question of voting arrangements within an expanding Council of Ministers. In August 1993 Karl Lamers, the CDU'S parliamentary spokesman on foreign affairs, suggested that successful votes should require a "double majority": a majority of member states representing also a majority of the EU'S population. Votes that now need to be unanimous could in future be made by a "super-qualified" majority: say four-fifths, or three-quarters, of the member states representing four-fifths or threequarters of the union's people.

But the worst quarrels could concern the parliament, not least because - at the urging of Chancellor Kohl - parliament's representatives are to help prepare the 1996 conference. Having won extra powers from the Maastricht treaty (it can, for example veto much legislation and its approval is needed for the appointment of the commission and its president), the parliament will want still more. But only Germany and the Benelux countries are keen to transfer any more power to the parliament; France and Britain are firmly against.

Europe's institutions, however, are simply the means to an end. The real problem is the end itself, that "ever closer union among the peoples of Europe". Can the union become "ever closer" while it is also getting bigger - can "deepening" coincide with "broadening"? Germany and the Benelux countries, true followers of Monnet, believe so almost as an act of principle. Pragmatic Britain, as ever, is sceptical.

Since Chancellor Kohl says that the EU convoy must not be forced to travel at the pace of the slowest ship, the solution will inevitably be some kind of agreement to disagree. There are good precedents: the Maastricht treaty allows Britain to "opt out" both from the goal of a single currency and from the EU'S commitment to enhance its "social policy"; Denmark has excused itself likewise from the single currency and, in an agreement after the treaty, from provisions on defence, foreign and judicial policies and European citizenship.

The question is how far there precedents can be taken before the club loses its sense of identity. That is what others object to in the British desire for an "A la carte approach": member states would sign up only to the policies they like - in other words, there could be lots of broadening but no need to deepen. Better, say France and Germany, to take the same path but let some proceed faster than others.

In May, in an article coinciding with a FrancoGerman summit in Mulhouse, Alain Lamassoure, the French minister for European affairs, called for a "new founding contract" by which a core group Of EU members-including France and Germanywould commit themselves to some basics: economic and monetary union, a common defence policy (including Eurocorps), immigration control and co-operation on police matters. Any country not wishing to sign up to these areas would lose the right to vote on them.

Now add Mr Lamassoure's article to the CDU'S "reflections" and to remarks by his prime minister, Edouard Balladur, made just before the CDU paper. Mr Balladur talked of an inner circle building a monetary and military union for themselves; other EU members, including new ones, could co-operate on foreign policy, security and trade; a third circle, embracing all of Europe, would co-operate still more loosely on diplomacy and trade. You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist - nor even John Major - to see a Europe which Antonio Martino, Italy's foreign minister, fears will be a Europe of "two speeds" and divisively "variable geometry".

But is there a better alternative? it is true that the inner core might grow increasingly distant from the outer-and poorer-circles. Over time, the inner core might also be less prepared to foot the bill for the development funds that help the others. But the French and the Germans make one thing clear: any country - even Britain - is very welcome to join the inner core. Provided, that is, it believes in an "ever closer" Europe.