BRUSSELS, 9 December 2003 — No one can predict exactly what will happen when Europe’s leaders gather for their Brussels summit this week. But you don’t need a crystal ball to make out a few certainties: Agreeing the EU constitution is likely to be just as difficult and ill-tempered as the mother of all haggles over the Nice treaty three years ago. That was supposed to fix the rules for a reunified Europe of 25 members or more, but came up with a botched and virtually incomprehensible result — mainly because Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder squabbled over whether 82 million Germans were “worth” the same number of votes as 60 million French.
This time round, the horse-trading — more elegantly rendered in Italian as mercato delle vacche — will be nastiest over the same issue. Spain and Poland show no sign of surrendering their terrific Nice deal of 27 votes each — compared to 29 for Britain, France, Italy and Germany. Schroeder, now playing hardball, is insisting on the simpler system proposed by Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s convention — which, as it happens, overgenerously reflects Germany’s size.
This is highly technical stuff — so thanks to those helpful diplomats e-mailing round handy software packages for calculating different combinations of qualified majority voting (QMV) weights and population criteria. Hats off, too, to the London communications agency Eurobandits, trying in vain with its “I Love QMV” campaign to explain what it all means: What it means is that Europe’s messy compromise between its member states, and between the national and the supranational, will be less Heath Robinson-like in future. Maybe.
Not that you’d know that from reading Britain’s Tory newspapers, scaremongering wildly about a constitution that will supposedly end 1,000 years of history, abolish the monarchy and surrender our oil reserves to Brussels. Even ostensibly minor issues terrify: Times readers are apoplectic over innocuous proposals to add the EU’s yellow stars to the Red Ensign — an attempt to tighten up merchant shipping registration rather than snuff out British national identity at the stroke of a Eurocrat’s pen.
Others see grave dangers to NATO and ties with Washington in the defense part of the constitution — though working with France and Germany, rather than letting them go it alone, is a sensible (and post-Iraq fence-mending) way to ensure that Britain can influence and, if necessary, block future EU military ambitions.
Sadly, the UK mindset still sees Europe as a treacherous place where sovereignty is sliced away by continental salami tacticians and a wrong move takes you straight to the top of a slippery slope leading to a dark and federalist abyss.
Blair knows how to play this game, and will doubtless triumphantly see off potty Italian plans for surrendering the veto on foreign policy. The fear is that a sudden deal on voting weights may leave the Foreign Office’s finest exposed as they defend other “red lines” on tax fraud and budget contributions — vital to protect the famous British rebate. The bigger question, though, will be how these shenanigans go down with voters in referendums and next summer’s European elections. QMV may keep the EU working. But lovable it ain’t.
And spare a thought, at this moment of impending drama, for Denis MacShane, the Europe minister, in trouble for criticizing Romano Prodi, the commission president. Prodi is now widely seen as a lame duck who wants to go home and beat Silvio Berlusconi. MacShane will be back on the job in Brussels, but on a shorter leash than usual. It is to be hoped, quipped one commission insider, that he won’t find any severed horse heads in his hotel bed.
