Qualified approval for treaty

Date: 12/06/1997

By Simon Coss

THE European Parliament's two main political groups have issued a warning to member states not to give in to last-minute temptations to unpick the carefully constructed draft treaty which is due to be approved by EU leaders in Amsterdam next week.

In the traditional pre-summit debate, MEPs from both the Socialist and the European People's Party (EPP) Groups gave what amounted to a qualified 'thumbs up' to the current version of the updated Maastricht Treaty.

EPP leader Wilfred Martens said he felt the latest draft drawn up by the Dutch EU presidency was a “valid document”. But in a thinly veiled criticism of recent political developments in France in the wake of the Socialists' election victory, he warned that there were “diplomatic initiatives being taken to undermine it”.

Socialist Group leader Pauline Green said there was still time to strengthen the treaty's planned new chapter on employment and argued that the insertion of the social chapter into the main body of EU law provided an ideal opportunity to reinforce the Union's commitment to social rights.

“We recognise the intricacies of the treaty, but we will be looking for more progress,” she said.

Green's British colleague, Labour Group leader Wayne David, described the Maastricht II text as “a modest but significant step forward”.

Both Green and Martens called for further extensions of qualified majority voting in EU policy-making. They said this should include more of those areas of justice and home affairs policy currently dealt with via intergovernmental cooperation which the new treaty would communitarise by transferring them to the so-called 'first pillar'.

But while the Parliament's two biggest groups appear to have concluded that the proposed treaty is probably the best deal they can hope for in the current political climate, their colleagues in the Green Group are taking a much less conciliatory line.

Speaking during yesterday's (11 June) debate, Green Group president Claudia Roth insisted that the updated treaty was unacceptable in its present form and should not be approved at Amsterdam.

“It resembles a Potemkin village with beautiful facades but little else,” she said.

The Greens believe that the new treaty does not adequately address employment problems, lessens the democratic accountability of EU governments and fails to deal properly with environmental issues.

Responding to comments by Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo that people were more interested in the food they had to eat than the design of the kitchen, Roth said: “ Citizens want to know what is being cooked up in the kitchen.”

Van Mierlo continued with the culinary theme when, at the end of the debate, he responded to Roth's comments with the observation that “too many cooks spoil the broth”.

Meanwhile, European Commission President Jacques Santer told MEPs that it was important for the IGC to end on time so that the EU could devote itself to the challenge of admitting new member states from central and eastern Europe.

Santer promised that if all went according to plan in Amsterdam, he would return to Strasbourg on 16 July to brief MEPs fully on the Commission's detailed plans for the final enlargement negotiations.

This would include unveiling its long-awaited avis (opinions) on the readiness of each applicant state to join the Union.