The EU summit, which took place last weekend in Nice, was touted to be the most important summit since the one held in Maastricht nine years ago. Though French President Jacques Chirac is reluctant to admit it, no miracles occurred at this last summit of his turn at the rotating European presidency.
Indeed the summit opened with a very strange contrast: On the one hand, the adoption of a Charter of Fundamental Rights, while, on the other, protestors against globalization conducted urban guerilla warfare in the streets of this staid resort town on the French Riviera.
International summit meetings used to be regarded as yawn-provoking events in distant places. Now they have emerged as hot destinations for an estranged generation. Many fear that Europe as an entity ignores the social deficit, the dark Darwinian side of economic liberalism. But the demonstrators are hardly a homogenous group. They range from Britain's Reclaim the streets movement, Spanish anarchists, French revolutionary communists, radical trade unionists, to the Basque and Corsican separatist movements.
Though united against a common enemy, globalization, they use two of its most important symbols to organize their efforts: cell phones and e-mail. Since the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in November last year, this jet set of dissenters has shown up at every global destination seeking to bring international meetings to their knees: The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January; the International Monetary Fund Meeting in Washington, DC, in April; the Biotech Convention in Genoa, Italy, in May; the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) meeting in Bologna, Italy in June, and the September meeting of the IMF and World Bank in Prague.
Most Europeans are convinced that a European identity does truly exist, though they struggle to define what that identity is with any words of precision. They can come up with infinite historical, cultural, anthropological, and ethnic indicators that Europeans presumably or effectively have in common. However, when it comes to operative and political decision-making, traditional national identities are the ones that prevail.
Nice was to be the summit that would set the ground rules for European expansion. For the most part, the 15-nation EU that exists today operates with rules that were created for a community of 6 countries in the late 1950s. The prospect of almost doubling in size over the next ten years requires radical streamlining of its decision-making procedures.
The most important issues included determining the voting powers of each state, putting a ceiling on the number of commissioners, and increasing the use of qualified majority voting (QMV),
The bigger states, like Germany, France, Britain, and Italy, continued to press for more voting power than the smaller states. And the smaller states, notwithstanding their disproportionate share of votes, put up stiff resistance to any reduction of their say.
Already more than 80 percent of EU policy is decided by QMV, a weighted voting system giving bigger countries more votes than smaller ones. However, many crucial areas still require unanimity, or at least a consensus among the 15 members. As the number of members rises over the next decade, it will be more and more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve consensus let alone unanimity.
As of late, the inner circles of the European Union have begun speaking once again, as they haven't done for a very long time, in terms of the French, the Germans, the English, the Italians, etc., and their relationship to each other. It has never been so evident that the true masters of Europe are the national governments that speak in name of their national populations. This is hardly the formula for creating a common political subject ready to perform as a single actor on the international stage. Even the Charter of Fundamental Rights speaks of the populations of Europe and not the European population.
Though sociologists and philosophers agree that
the nation states of Europe cannot survive without succumbing to the centripetal
force of economic globalization,
European public opinion is still attached to
the concept of national sovereignty, fearing both the transfer of sovereignty
to a higher level, Europe, as well to a lower level, the regions.
The marathon summit, the longest in EU history, concluded with anticlimactic watered down plans to eliminate national vetoes, extend majority voting to more policy areas, and postpone any far-reaching streamlining of the Executive European Commission for at least a decade.
The Treaty of Nice consists of a series of low profile compromises, conjured up to hide its own failure. They did just what the disenchanted Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker feared they would do "scale down our ambition and then, in the great European tradition, call it a success."
December 2000
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