Work begins on joint IGC agenda

Date: 16/11/1995

By Thomas Klau

FRANCE and Germany this week launched a process of cooperation designed to ensure that the EU's two most powerful members approach next year's Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) with a common strategy.

Eager to dispel persistent doubts about the strength of the Bonn-Paris axis following Jacques Chirac's election to the French presidency, France's Foreign Minister Hervé de Charette and his German counterpart Klaus Kinkel took pains after a meeting in Paris to reaffirm the closeness of their alliance - dismissing all rumours to the contrary as “totally wrong”.

Franco-German cooperation, said de Charette, is “a Formula One engine in full action, as everybody will be able to see throughout 1996”.

The two men said little at their joint press conference to back up their claim that they had moved substantially closer towards a common agenda for the IGC. However, Werner Hoyer, Germany's representative on the IGC Reflection Group, said afterwards that both countries now agreed on a “catalogue of principles”. He said these should be finalised at a summit between German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Jacques Chirac in Baden-Baden on 7 December and then presented to the European summit in Madrid.

Hoyer said there was consensus over the need to step up efficiency in all areas of EU policy-making, reduce the number of decision-making procedures from 27 to just three, bring cooperation in home affairs under partial Community competence in asylum and visa matters (with other issues such as the fight against crime remaining firmly in the intergovernmental sphere), and give the common foreign and security policy an identifiable face.

In a statement published after their 75-minute discussion, Kinkel and de Charette named an extension of majority voting in the Council of Ministers as one of their most important common goals for the IGC. The aim, they said, was to ensure greater efficiency in EU decision-making.

But de Charette immediately qualified this position by admitting that the introduction of systematic majority voting on common foreign and defence policy issues, strongly pushed for by Germany, was still being debated within the French government.

The tentative French proposal to extend France's nuclear umbrella to the rest of the EU was mentioned by neither minister.

In a gesture towards Bonn, de Charette agreed to include in the statement a strong call for rapid enlargement towards Central and Eastern Europe, hailed as “an historic chance” to be grasped soon, with the first accession talks beginning shortly after the IGC.

Finally, France and Germany called for the IGC to start in March or April 1996 and be concluded by mid-1997 at the latest.

Both ministers again reaffirmed their countries' commitment to achieve monetary union under Maastricht Treaty rules by January 1999. The two also supported their financial ministers' call for a supplementary stability agreement between member states participating in the single currency, designed to coerce all participating countries into extremely strict budgetary discipline.

While the Paris meeting can safely be read as a clear sign of both governments' eagerness to maintain the momentum of their traditional cooperation, diplomats say establishing a common approach towards the IGC will require considerable flexibility on both sides of the Rhine.

While Bonn is unwavering in its federalist commitment, Paris has so far given no clear indication of what losses of sovereignty it might accept.

Without attempting to establish a common master-plan that would unnecessarily antagonise other EU countries, French and German foreign ministry officials have been busy for months sounding out each other's position and looking for areas of agreement.

But substantial decisions will not be taken by de Charette or Kinkel, neither of whom enjoys a particularly high standing within their own governments. Officials say the real work on the IGC is being dealt with by a small group of influential advisers in France's Elysee Palace and Germany's Bundeskanzleramt (the chancellor's office), directly referring to and taking guidance from Chirac and Kohl.