WISH LIST FOR EUROPE

The EU Reflection Group's task is to shape the IGC agenda

by Ian Davidson

(The Financial Time, 05/07/95)

It is scarcely a month since the European Union's Reflection Group started preparing the ground for next year's inter-governmental conference. It has held its first three meetings, but still has 12 to go before it presents its report to the year-end European summit in Madrid. So it is too soon to make detailed forecasts about where it will end up.

But there are two predictions which can already be made with some confidence. First, the work of the Reflection Group will be critical to the success or failure of the IGC itself. Second, it seems clear from the way the group has started its work that its final report must be far-reaching in its implications.

The most important characteristic of next year's IGC is that there is no political consensus between the member states on what it is for, or why it is being held.

Formally, it is a legal requirement of the 1991 Maastricht treaty, for the purpose of reviewing and/or revising the specifics of half a dozen articles. Some member governments, starting with the British, take a minimalist view of the IGC, and would much prefer to limit it to this narrow function of a technical tune-up.

But at the other, maximalist end of the spectrum are member states which believe the flaws in Maastricht are much bigger than allowed for in the half-dozen articles; in particular, they say the two new "pillars" tacked on to the Community, for dealing with foreign policy and police matters, are simply not working, and therefore need much larger reforms.

In any case, the Union is dominated by its now unbreakable commitment to offer membership to another 12 candidate states, mostly from eastern Europe. Such a large Union of 27 countries may simply not function without far-reaching reforms of the decision-making machinery. There is no consensus on what these reforms should be; but the Union has decreed that solving this conundrum is an extra task for the IGC.

Mr Carlos Westendorp, the urbane Spanish diplomat who is chairing the Reflection Group, insists that its task is not to negotiate or attempt to pre-cook the IGC proper. Formally, he is right. But the practical reality is that, unless the Reflection Group can put some order into the agenda, the IGC risks being a shambles.

It is not easy to see how the group can do this, given the deep ideological divisions between the states about where the Union should go. But Mr Westendorp obviously had two tactical options. He could play safe, by working painstakingly through the legal agenda obligations in the Maastricht treaty and elsewhere; or he could take risks, by setting his group a much broader agenda of his devising. He decided to take risks.

The main risk he took was in starting his agenda almost with a blank sheet of paper, and addressing head-on some of the most fundamental questions facing the European Union: Why do we need an IGC? What are the Union's problems? Are its traditional principles still valid? Where is it going? In brief, what are the essential challenges facing the Union at the century's end?

Mr Westendorp's list of these essential challenges shows that he expects an ambitious agenda for the IGC: the risks to the Union's external security; the threats to its internal security, such as drugs and crime; and the need for a better deal for the citizen, in terms of transparency, legitimacy and subsidiarity.

His list starts, unsurprisingly, with the mid-term prospect ofa massive enlargement of the union. For a near-doubling of the Union's membership, in which all the new members are much poorer and have very different political histories, is almost bound to transform its character; and no one really knows whether it can continue to function and still hold together with common policies and common interests.

The group is not expected to agree pat answers to these big issues. Some would say that it is dangerously provocative, and certainly quite unorthodox, to plonk on the table a debate on these most basic questions, about the nature and the future of an enlarged union. After all, the whole of the Union's previous history has been based on a conspiracy by the member states to close their eyes to each others' conflicting dogmas. But the implications of mega-enlargement are so great that it may be that the ideological choices must now be made explicit.

To meet these challenges, Mr Westendorp has set out four policy areas which must be tackled: the institutions; citizenship and internal security; external and security policy; and the Union's instruments, common policies and resources.

Initially, it had looked as though some of the member states, starting with the French, might try to use the Cannes summit to strong-arm the group, just as it was starting work. In the event, these anxieties proved groundless: the summit approved the Westendorp work programme, and endorsed in full his agenda of issues. The implication must be that the Union will be gearing up for an IGC in 1996 which is ambitious, broadbased and probably radical.

The IGC faces two serious problems: British resistance to any change, and the risks of a confused and sprawling negotiating agenda. The Reflection Group cannot finesse the British problem, and Mr Westendorp is resisting German suggestions that the group prolong its work well into next year, in the hope of circumventing the British. But he is already confident that, by identifying the problems the Union must deal with, and by setting out different options for the states, the group will make a useful contribution to the clarification of the IGC agenda.