It is May and Europe’s thoughts turn to the moribund constitution. Which is why the European parliament has been organising a get together between it - the allegedly most powerful legislature in Europe - and national parliaments.
With a maximum of 212 national parliamentarians attending, there were 70 MEPS. - including some usual British suspects as Richard Corbett, Andrew Duff and Charles Tannock - separating into four working groups: one to discuss the EU in the world and its external borders. Working group two discussing globalisation and the European economic and social model, group three discussing freedom, security and justice and group four devoted to the union’s future financial resources.
I went along to the building nicknamed caprice des dieux - after that cheese, and because of its similar ovoid shape - and sat in at the proceedings.
I was intrigued: almost everything in the new constitution would increase the areas of EU legislation subject to codecision - -ie European parliamentary, as opposed to intergovernmental, say. If every institution can be seen as organism whose sole raison d’etre is to fight for its own survival, then what interest do national parliaments have in coming to the table?
The difficulties are further compounded by the fact that the two bodies are of a different nature: one is a working legislature - ie, as alluded to an earlier entry, MEPS are having to compete with the technocrats in specialist knowledge to form judgments.
The others are material from which governments are formed, and so are expected to shut up for much of the time. As Arlene McCarthy MEP said: “If you want to do something come to the European parliament; if you want to be someone go to national legislatures.”
Given this mismatch, one can understand why senator Honorio Novo, a Portuguese leftist, and national deputy, took a truculent view of the idea of national and European parliaments being yoked together to drag the constitution back into life.
In his bluntness, he even resorted to the imagery of English humour: “This constitution is pining for the fjords.”
But he was in a minority. Several speakers noted that Finland has just become the 16th country to ratify the constitution, by parliamentary means. A majority of Europeans, headcount wise, were therefore for it - a stance known in Europe as the Juncker position, after the fanatically europhile Luxembourg prime minister who presumably has the least to lose from giving up his small nation’s national sovereignty. Here the view was forcefully argued by many deputies. “The constitution is alive and kicking,” said one Pole. “50 years after the Schuman declaration we have the same institutions for 25 nations as for six,” said Inigo Mendez de Vigo, a famous Spanish MEP. “A break in the journey is not the end.”
Moreover, a commission paper was about to be produced on the constitution and Chancellor Merkel was expected to make a statement on it.
So is the ball rolling or not? Politics is as much about creating reality as reflecting it, and both sides were trying their best.
On the anti-constutition side, David Heathcote Amory, who made a late intervention seemingly over refreshed after entering with his colleague Charles Tannock, doesn't seem to think so when he said:" No powers at all are being returned to the member states. We have to build a Europe from below up not top down." When I left, I was the only journalist in the press gallery. Only three had turned up at all.
