POWER POLITICS IN EUROPE
12/21/2003
IN THE CONFERENCE room where presidents and prime ministers last week failed to agree on a new European constitution, ashtrays symbolized the conflict between ideal and reality that haunts the quest for a more perfect European Union. The EU headquarters were festooned with no-smoking signs. But some leaders smoked while haggling about a draft charter produced by a constitutional convention headed by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president. One consequence of the Brussels debacle could be an EU divided between what the current French president, Jacques Chirac, calls six "pioneer" countries pursuing supranational unification and those that prefer a loose federation. Or, after a decent interlude, the disputants could reconvene and try to find the compromises that eluded them.
The deal-breaker in Brussels was an argument over voting rights. Although the dispute, which pitted Poland and Spain against countries led by France and Germany, had its technical aspect, the principle at stake was something that goes to the heart of any voluntary association of political entities: the distribution of power among the members.
This issue was addresed in the US Constitution and continues to be argued in our political discourse and in American courts. The electoral votes of the slave states were a factor leading to the Civil War, so Americans ought to be able to appreciate the intensity of feelings about the weighting of votes in the EU's Council of Ministers.
By clinging to an apportionment of voting power decided upon three years ago at a summit in Nice, France, the Poles and Spaniards were understandably seeking to defend their national interests against bigger countries. Under the Nice formula, four big countries -- Germany, France, Italy, and Britain -- each were to have 29 votes. As medium-sized countries in the three-tier Nice system, Poland and Spain -- each with about half the population of Germany -- were to receive 27 votes each.
Under the terms of Giscard's draft, to become law a bill would need a simple majority of the 25 EU members and also a tally representing 60 percent of the EU's population. In Brussels, Chirac and Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder refused a compromise that would have raised the double-majority bar to 70 percent of the EU's population.
By protecting their own national interests while castigating Poland and Spain for doing the same, Chirac and Schroeder were illustrating how difficult it will be to fulfill their ambition of binding together a United States of Europe as a new superpower.
Instead of disparaging old Europe, the Bush administration should display solidarity with European allies struggling to strike a balance between the ideal of a superstate and the reality of national sovereignty.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
