Calls grow for firmer hand on EU tiller

Date: 16/07/1998

Foreign ministers are under mounting pressure to reassert their role as the co-ordinators of Union policy-making. By Mark Turner explains why

WHAT has 15 heads, 30 eyes and a small army to do its legwork, but has no idea where it is heading?

Answer: the EU's General Affairs Council (GAC), which a growing number of Eurocrats believe is in a period of profound crisis.

With monetary union on the doorstep and enlargement to more than 20 potential new members just round the corner, the EU needs a firmer hand on the tiller than at perhaps any other time in its history.

Yet its coordinating body, subservient only to the twice-yearly summits of Union leaders, has all but delegated the day-to-day running of the Union to unelected officials and junior ministers.

Instead of working through politically fraught questions surrounding economics, trade and the single market, foreign affairs ministers arrive at the GAC late, discuss one major foreign policy issue at lunch, speak to the press and leave early. Other business is more often than not rubber-stamped on the advice of EU ambassadors or left to other councils.

"The original idea was that the General Affairs Council should provide a synthesis. That was the spirit of the drafters of the Treaty of Rome," complains former European Commission President Jacques Delors, now head of the big-hitting Notre Europe think-tank. "We are confronted now with a situation that cannot last. No one is in control. There is a plea for a return to a strong GAC which can arbitrate and also master."

Until 1970, the GAC was the then European Economic Community's supreme arbiter. From 1967 to 1970, it met 37 times, accounting for more than one in four ministerial encounters.

But in 1970, two important events took place. The first was the creation of the European Council, brainchild of soon-to-be French President Giscard d'Estaing, which gave heads of state and government the supreme supervisory role in all European affairs. The second was the launch of an informal Foreign Policy Council which, crucially, was held at the same time and place as the GAC.

"This created a confusion between the two councils," says Delors, who believes the move sowed the seeds of today's crisis.

Until the 1990s, however, the set-up appeared to work relatively well. Although in the late Seventies, a group of three wise men was invited to find ways of improving the council's efficiency as its workload increased, few questioned its fundamental structure.

Foreign ministers would prepare European Councils in a weekend 'conclave' and haul their colleagues (such as agriculture ministers) into line whenever they grew too obstreperous.

But in 1991, as the Soviet Union crumbled, Europe received a shock from which it has yet to recover: the break-up of Yugoslavia and the most vicious war on the continent since the fall of Berlin.

Suddenly, the humdrum coordination of the Union's economic policies was hijacked by a screaming demand for a common European security policy as the tanks rolled and the shells thundered down. The GAC was the obvious, and only candidate for the job.

"The war gave foreign ministers a reason for not doing what they were not interested in: coordinating internal policies," says Danish former Council Secretary-General Niels Ersboll.

Instead, they spent hour after hour debating the war.

They have proved loath to abandon that practice ever since, with the drudgery of single market coordination almost always taking second place to lunch-time geo-politics, whether focused on Turkey, Kosovo or the Asian financial crisis.

At the same time, a number of other important changes took place. Ministers of transport, the environment, and a range of previously domestic dossiers began to play a more European tune and discovered they were often better placed to take decisions than the GAC.

As monetary union moved closer, Ecofin (the Council of economic and finance ministers), emerged at the top of the heap to such an extent that no European Council now takes place without its participation.

The Maastricht Treaty, which entrenched the GAC's foreign affairs role, added more complications.

EU foreign ministers suddenly found themselves meeting third country representatives on a regular basis, distracting from their other duties.

"Ministers had an increasing number of relatively unimportant representative duties to take care of," says Martin Westlake, author of several books on the EU institutions. "There was less time to engage in serious policy debate."

Finally, the 1990s were marked by a growing tendency for EU member states to use their six-month presidencies as show-pieces, centralising decision-making and usurping many of the GAC's coordinating responsibilities.

The net result has, according to critics, been a steady decline in the quality of European Councils.

By 1995, the impending crisis was apparent. During preparations for the Amsterdam summit which brought the Intergovernmental Conference on EU reform to a climax, Carlos Westendorp's Reflection Group noted "the need for the GAC to regain its role of general coordination of the Union's affairs, ensuring overall consistency in Council actions in all areas of the treaty".

But EU leaders roundly avoided the question in Amsterdam, distracted by questions about the size of the European Commission and the weighting of member states' votes.

Faced with growing concern, however, EU leaders decided at last month's Cardiff summit that the debate could be delayed no longer and gave Vienna the task of sorting things out.

Foreign ministers formally launched the debate on the GAC's role this week and Austria plans to devote an entire informal council to the question in September.

"It is our intention to regain and strengthen the original role of the GAC so that it can be the coordinating, horizontal council," asserts the country's EU ambassador Manfred Scheich, who has already insisted that it will keep a very tight reign on negotiations on the Agenda 2000 reform package.

But there are deep divisions over how the GAC can be strengthened in practice.

According to Delors, the answer is clear. There should be a GAC of vice-prime ministers whose sole task is to coordinate European affairs, with absolute power over Union business.

Judging by the rumours that UK Premier Tony Blair is trying to centralise European policy in the British cabinet office, this appears to be an option favoured by some countries. But it poses severe problems for those with coalitions where the vice-prime ministership usually goes to the junior partner.

An overly strong GAC might also be resented by other Councils. "Delors has an idea which is totally different to mine ... He thinks it should be superior. But the secret of a good coordinating body is that it is not seen as superior," says Ersboll.

Another option could be to split the GAC into two, reserving foreign affairs for foreign ministers and leaving other issues to Brussels-based Europe ministers. This, known as the 'Coreper III' approach, is essentially what Westendorp's group called for.

But it too raises concerns. "It would be highly desirable if ministers for Europe spent more time in Brussels, with an office in the permanent representation," says Stanley Crossick of the European Policy Centre.

"But if ministers spent most of their time here, they would lose touch with their home countries and national governments. That would be a step in the wrong direction."

Coreper III could have the advantage, however, of easing the job of EU ambassadors in Coreper II, which is also in profound disarray. As the GAC has done less, Coreper has taken on more, making its job increasingly difficult.

At first sight, that should not be a problem. Coreper II's role could be partly assumed by the committee of political directors (PoCo), justice directors (K4) and treasury officials, who recently scored a significant victory by excluding Coreper II from Euro-11 meetings. These committees could also report to Coreper III, easing Coreper II's horizontal duties.

But EU ambassadors have taken rather a liking to their new-found power and are loath to give it up. Any attempts to change Coreper II and the GAC's role therefore face a fundamental obstacle.

As things stand, Union ambassadors and foreign ministers will have to prepare the debate before the European Council decides on the way ahead, and they are unlikely to suggest demoting themselves. And the reason that the debate is needed at all is because both bodies are proving unable to prepare European Council business adequately.

Until the decision-making procedures are changed, it will be impossible to prepare a high-quality debate.

But for those changes to happen, a debate needs to take place first.

How that paradox will be resolved is anyone's guess.

Major feature on calls to reform the role of the General Affairs Council in EU policy-making.