June 15, 2003	Sunday	Rabi-us-Sani 14, 1424

BRUSSELS: The constitution adopted on Friday for the enlarged European Union could radically change the way the bloc does business, but only if member states do not scupper its key advances in inter-governmental negotiations later this year.

Tasked with finding ways to keep the EU functioning when it expands from 15 to 25 members next year, a landmark Convention on the Future of Europe completed a draft constitution on Friday offering a streamlined system for taking decisions.

Former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who headed the unique forum, will present the text to an EU summit in Greece next week and urge governments not to unpick its subtle compromises in talks due to start in October on a new treaty.

“I hope it will not be unravelled because that would be a political mistake,” Giscard told a news conference. “I don’t think it will be unravelled because that would be a backward step, and we have already examined all the alternatives.”

His main weapon in defending the Convention’s draft is the almost unanimous consensus built over 16 months behind a delicate package deal of institutional reforms.

The Convention proposed a long-term full-time chairman of the European Council of national leaders, an EU foreign minister and a slimmed-down executive European Commission.

It called for a big expansion in majority decision making and, perhaps most radically, a change in the voting system that would take far greater account of population size, effectively boosting the power of the largest member states.

MARKER: In future, decisions on justice and home affairs, and an array of other issues except for taxation and foreign policy, would be decided by majority voting.

“Now we have to convince our governments not to unscramble what we’ve achieved,” Dutch lawmaker Frans Timmermans said.

But 18 of the 28 governments that participated in the forum put down a marker on Thursday that they would seek to retain the complex voting system agreed at the EU’s 2000 Nice summit, which give small and medium-sized states disproportionate power.

Nice gave Spain and Poland only two votes fewer than Germany despite having half its population. Luxembourg’s 450,000 people have four votes compared to 29 votes for Germany’s 82 million.

Under Giscard’s plan, a decision would pass if backed by at least half of all member states representing at least 60 per cent of the total population.

“Germany and Turkey would be able to block any decision in the future EU,” said Jens-Peter Bonde, a Eurosceptic Danish member of the European Parliament. EU candidate Turkey would be the second most populous country after Germany if it joined.

EU governments’ ambivalence about the results of the Convention were mirrored in the annotated agenda for next week’s summit circulated to member states on Friday by Greece, which currently holds the rotating presidency.

The key phrase on how strongly to endorse the draft has two alternative wordings which leaders will debate in Thessaloniki.

One would designate the draft as “the starting point” for an Intergovernmental Conference that will draft a new treaty, while the other would make it “a broad basis” for those negotiations.

If the first wording is adopted, the Convention may have served as little more than a warm-up act for another marathon haggle between member states grimly clinging to their acquired rights with little regard for the efficiency of the EU.

The EU’s six founding members — Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg — all want the Convention’s draft to be the main basis for a new treaty with only minor adjustments in the IGC.

OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS: Many other stakeholders had one reason or another for disappointment with the text. Christian Democrats bitterly lamented the absence of any reference to God or Christianity.

A small minority of Eurosceptics argued that the Convention had given birth to a “European superstate”, despite new rules that will for the first time give national parliaments a chance to block intrusive legislative proposals from Brussels.

Fervent federalists deplored the retention of national vetos in sensitive policy areas and what many saw as a weakening of the supranational European Commission.

Giscard argued passionately that his draft was the only plausible compromise between big and small states, and federal and inter-governmental institutions, reflecting the dual nature of the EU as a hybrid of states and peoples.

Political analysts say it may offer the best hope of a grand institutional bargain that could keep the EU running for decades to come.

“Europe badly needs a compromise acceptable to both large and small states — but one that improves both EU legitimacy and effectiveness,” said Steven Everts and Daniel Keohane of the London-based Centre for European Reform.—Reuters