It's about time these eurosceptics stopped Laeken about

In the ever-more imaginative scramble for arguments against the Lisbon Treaty, a new and sophisticated variant has been put forward in recent letters to Parliamentary Brief.  

According to eurosceptics like David Heathcoat-Amory MP and Gisela Stuart MP, the democratic promise of the Laeken declaration has been betrayed by the grubby conspiracy which is the Reform Treaty: ‘let us go back to the Laeken declaration and this time take its instructions seriously’, states Heathcoat-Amory. It is indeed a novelty to hear eurosceptics elevating an initiative of the Belgians to the level of a sacred text.

To recap, the Laeken European Council on December 14th/15th 2001 amended and then adopted a declaration on ‘The Future of Europe’ submitted by the Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, on the basis of a paper put forward by a group of ‘wise persons’ including in their number our current foreign secretary David Miliband.

They had been asked to do this work in the wake of the Nice Treaty which, in the view of many, had failed to produce the reforms necessary to make the enlarged Union work efficiently.

However, the declaration is not in itself a blueprint for reforms. Still less is it a ‘set of instructions’; it is a catalogue of the questions that needed to be addressed if the Union of the future, with 25 or 27 or more member states, was to be relevant, democratic and effective.

It did indeed talk of a ‘democratic challenge’, saying that ‘the European institutions must be brought closer to the citizens... (be) less unwieldy, less rigid ...and (above all) more efficient and open ... (while not) intervening in every detail.’ Citizens felt that ‘deals are all too often cut out of their sight’, and they want ‘better democratic scrutiny’.

So the Laeken declaration poses the problem, and lays down the objectives, but in no way prescribes the solutions. It simply asks the following questions. How can the division of competencies be made more transparent? How can subsidiarity be applied? How could foreign and defence policy be developed more coherently? Should there be an integrated approach to police and criminal policy co-operation? How can it ensure that the European dynamic does not come to a halt?

And about institutions it asks: should the number of different legislative instruments be reduced? How could the democratic legitimacy, efficiency and transparency of the institutions be enhanced? What expanded role should there be for national parliaments? Should there be more qualified majority voting, more European parliament / council co-decision, more coherence and co-ordination between the high representative and the commission, and quid the rotating presidencies? Finally, among its fifty questions, the spectre of adopting a constitutional text is raised, again as a question.

As we know, the Laeken summit agreed not just the declaration, but also the setting up of the convention, which rapidly espoused the ‘constitutional method’ of making the reforms, and produced its own draft Constitutional Treaty.

When this hit the buffers in France and the Netherlands, for reasons which had nothing whatsoever to do with the text of the treaty, a suitably chastened council returned to the original idea of a limited number of reforms to make the institutions of an enlarged EU work better.

In fact, the changes agreed at Lisbon do answer at least some of the questions raised in the Laeken declaration. As well as new instruments to make external and security policy more effective and coherent, and preparing the way for a more integrated approach to the police and judicial co-operation, the treaty has made some significant strides in ensuring that decision-making more efficient, open and democratic.

The new treaty does not extend the competences of the Union, but it does allow for its current duties to be carried out more efficiently. The extension of qualified majority voting to a significant number of issues, but not those of overriding national importance, reduces the danger of a Union condemned to move forward only at the speed of its slowest member.

Above all, Lisbon completes the chain of public accountability in the Union: a commission fully answerable to a parliament, directly elected by all Europe’s citizens; all EU legislation, the annual budget and the multiannual financial framework to be adopted only if a majority of MEPs and a majority of member states agree; national parliaments now able to blow the whistle on any new legislation if it infringes the principle of subsidiarity.

It would strengthen Europe’s parliamentary dimension more if, instead of criticising the European parliament, some of our national parliamentarians looked at ways of reforming Westminster’s procedures so that UK ministers in council might be held more fully to account, and that the new possibilities offered in the treaty for this ‘subsidiarity check’ might be exploited to the full.  

For while a rather arcane debate is held in the UK about the textual differences between the Lisbon Treaty and the constitution, Europe is moving on.

 Its current agenda is increasingly focused on issues which are of relevance to citizens: climate change, sustainable development, economic competitiveness, security of energy supply at affordable prices, international peacekeeping and judicial co-operation etc.

In passing one could simply note that it has been the constant objective of successive UK governments to get Europe to concentrate on those questions where it has an evident value added, and this is now happening.

To assert that the Reform Treaty somehow betrays the Laeken declaration is to misread what that declaration says and to misunderstand its purpose.

But in a broader sense, the new Treaty,  albeit in a less ambitious form than in the constitution, has paid heed to the concerns raised at Laeken and has found some positive, and, occasionally, imaginative answers to the questions posed.

       Julian Priestley was Secretary General of the European parliament from 1997 to 2007.His book, ‘Six Battles That Shaped Europe’s Parliament’ will be published by John Harper Publishing in May 2008.