CDU endorses integration plan

Date: 19/10/1995

By Thomas Klau

THE unanimous endorsement by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ruling Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) party of ever closer integration within the European Union has set down one of the parameters for next year's renegotiation of the Maastricht Treaty.

Approval of the ambitious programme, at its conference in the southern German city of Karlsruhe, has also confirmed Kohl's grip over arguably Europe's most powerful conservative party and fuelled speculation he may lead his forces into the next general election in 1998, remaining on the European stage until the next millennium.

Kohl will have his first opportunity to discuss the path approved by the CDU with French President Jacques Chirac when the two leaders meet to discuss European affairs in Bonn next Wednesday (25 October).

At the top of the party's European programme is support for the government's call to turn the Maastricht convergence criteria into permanent and binding stability rules for all countries in the single currency zone. Kohl, addressing his comments at a wider audience, recalled how inflation had destroyed public faith in democracy before Hitler came to power in 1933 and explained German tenacity for the criteria: “Dear friends in Europe, it is not some German hysteria if we stress again and again...that the Maastricht Treaty stability criteria must be maintained and not questioned.”

The CDU wants to inject some muscle into the EU's fledgling common security and defence policy by advocating that decisions be taken in a double vote in Council, securing the agreement of a majority of member states representing a majority of the EU's population.

In the most sensitive issue of all, the dispatching of troops, national sensitivities will be protected by giving member states a right to opt-out of military actions agreed by a majority. But a minority of countries, stresses the resolution, should not be able to block their colleagues from taking common military action if they so wish.

The party's wholehearted backing of Kohl's federalist ambition extends to Maastricht's wobbly third pillar on justice and home affairs and the fight against crime. The CDU approves of taking power away from national governments to regulate the influx of foreigners wishing to visit, seek refuge or live in the EU, and placing it in the hands of the EU.

Firmly convinced that Germany's recipe for economic achievement should be accepted by the rest of the Union, it calls for an “ecological and social market economy” to be adopted as a model for the whole EU. The planned quantum leaps in European integration are not, the party stresses, to be carried out at the expense of stabilising Germany's eastern borders. The CDU is calling for the first Central and Eastern European members - probably Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and possibly Slovakia or Slovenia - to be accepted in the EU around the year 2000. Nato membership could be envisaged at an even earlier date, the CDU suggests.

In a gesture to Germany's independent-minded Länder, the congress agreed that the whole corpus of EU legislation should be reviewed to strengthen compliance with the principle of subsidiarity to ensure that no responsibilities which could be appropriately dealt with at national or regional level are transferred to Brussels.