Decision making procedures after Lisbon
It was a great relief when the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was complete and when this was perceived as such by politicians and public opinion alike. A relief in the first place, because non ratification would have been a disastrous step back for the further implementation of common market principles; a relief as well at a time when euro-scepticism is growing, and the tiresome debate about institutional affairs is felt like a way to escape treating the core business of the European Union.
It is a fact that a broad majority of citizens is in favor of the common goals of a European Union; the ways to achieve these goals, however, remain a misty secret of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
We failed to provide the EU with a structure which would be simple enough to be easily understood. There are, however, no simple answers to complex questions, as both the history as well as the economic situation of every single member state, have to be taken into account.
European decision-making has become a succession of compromises; and finding the compromise to the compromise has become part of the secrecy of decision making processes within the European Union:
This means that a Commission proposal has to take into account national concerns, concerns of industries, sometimes strongly linked to member states interests, and citizens’ interests defended by the European Parliament. Numerous lobbyists in Brussels are continuously interfering in this decision making process.
Will the Lisbon treaty help to change all this?
That is the big question, and the answer is not easy at all, as a change of paradigm occurred between the first European treaty, signed in Rome in 1957, and the last one signed in Lisbon in December 2007.
The substantial progress achieved between those two dates, through the treaties of Amsterdam, of Maastricht and Nice, has not really been acknowledged by a larger average of Europe’s population. Eight years of a constitutional debate and often stormy disagreement have only modestly improved democracy and efficiency within the European Union. The rejection and/or renegotiation of treaties, which had already been signed by heads of states, leave question-marks: in whose name did they sign? On whose behalf did the Czech President refuse to sign, despite the fact that the ratification had been approved by the democratic institutions of his own country?
Never have questions about the efficiency of the institutions been more incisive, than after France’s and the Netherlands’ refusal to accept the so called Constitution, which had been signed in October 2004 by all heads of state, and ratified by 18 member states. In both countries, the debates during the weeks prior to the referendum have also been strongly focused on national political issues: in France it was the ‘polish plumber’, a popular expression to describe what the so called “Bolkenstein directive” had planned as a model for workers mobility within the EU . In both countries the debate was on Islam and the acceptance of Turkey as a full member of the EU. As governments of both these countries were fairly unpopular in those days, the final vote could also be seen as a sanction of national politics. In the Netherlands 80% of Parliament members were in favor of the constitution. So, what about their representation within a democracy in this situation? Voters’ participation in both referenda was much higher than in general European elections.
Public opinion, as expressed during elections, must be taken into account. Are democracies, who abandon the executive power to those who have been elected in free elections, still functioning the way they should when it comes to supranational decision-making? Is not the fact that the participation in European Parliament elections has been so very low, a strong hint that something is deeply wrong in the construction we made?
What do citizens really want, what do they know about the common problems of 27 members states, what are they told by their heads of state about decision-making in Brussels? Aren’t all bad things – which occur too often – considered to be decisions of the EU, and the good things, are they not presented as results of outstanding national performances?
It is a fact that patterns of thinking have remained national, while problems have become global. To act locally and to think globally, that is what we need to do. Will it be enough to explaining this to our citizens to generate a better understanding?
In the current economic crises the job to be done in Europe is to prevent outbreaks of national protectionism. Just imagine for a second that we would not have had a common currency in the euro zone, the financial crises would most certainly have caused much greater damage than it actually did.
This alone should have raised fresh enthusiasm for our common goals, or at least could have created a feeling for greater strength resulting from joint action, and for the urgent need to speed up the latter. Alas, the contrary is the case; protectionist tendencies have emerged in a number of member states. Citizens seem to feel more protected by their national potential, than by joint action in a union with common goals.
Two phenomena became apparent during the period of economic crises.
First: The official statements of the leaders of big member states, France, Germany and the UK. The joint press conferences of this threesome gave the impression that the three major economies had taken over exclusive leadership. They totally ignored what made the European Union so unique in the world, namely a union made of bigger, but also of smaller states, working together on an equal footing.
Second: the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe gave a serious warning when it said that the Bundestag had to be more closely involved in European legislation. As the Council of Ministers still is to be a co-legislator, does the German Government representative now have to check his decisions with the Bundestag before any Council meeting? What will time schedules for decision making have to look like in the future?
National parliaments will have a more active role to play, which raises practical questions about of how to organize the handling of initiatives taken by European Institutions.
In this respect, the basic role of the European Parliament really does not seem to be fully acknowledged by EU citizens as that of a genuine representative and democratic institution of the European construction. The Lisbon treaty has provided the EP with important new powers regarding EU legislation, EU budget and international agreements. The directly elected Parliament is now placed on an equal footing with the Council.
Greater involvement of national parliaments, as it is included in the Lisbon text, is not considered as a sufficient guarantee by the German court.
On the other hand, to say that Europe is not democratic, means to ignore all the efforts made by the last European Commission in favor of greater transparency in decision making: The debates in Parliament can be followed live on the internet, committee meetings are now open to the press, the hotline of commission services should provide answers to all the questions citizens might ask. And yet, in spite of all these possibilities of information, writing about Europe on the front page of a newspaper cuts down its circulation. Public interest in European affairs has decreased in parallel to the opening of the institutions to a wider public.
From the democratic bodies they have elected, citizens expect to be told, and to understand, what is going on; they want their elected representatives to explain what they are working on and what they are voting for. This has become a fairly impossible task for those who are closely involved in the decision making process. The wording of the European slang, filled with abbreviations, has become unintelligible to the average population. If we want this to change, the Lisbon treaty alone cannot provide the answers.
Contrary to the Constitution the Lisbon treaty does not mention the EU’s ambition to become a union of citizens, with a common citizenship, a flag, and an anthem. In the Lisbon treaty, the most frequently expressed concern of the EU, namely the « deepening before enlarging », has not been taken into account. As a consequence, the new agreement appears to be a technical improvement of the way the three main European institutions work together.
If we wish to improve the way decisions are made, we will have to start with an analysis of the recent past.
One example: The Spanish presidency started with Mr. Bean appearing on its internet homepage instead of Spain’s prime minister. And the links to the site collapsed…, thanks to the British comic..!
Apart from this joke on the net, Mr.Zapatero used his first address to the press to ask for additional powers for the Commission.
He was absolutely right to speak of a failure when he referred to the Lisbon agenda, or to the so called Lisbon strategy. Indeed, the plan to make Europe the world’s most competitive economy, approved in Lisbon in the year 2000, failed. It is a fact, that there had been no binding rules to determine the amounts to be invested in research and innovation in order to achieve the goals agreed upon.
But let us have a look at the way the decision had been taken: it was under the Portuguese Presidency, the first in the new millennium: a strong message was needed, and it was to be energetically announced by the minister in charge; and there was the wish to be present on the political agenda during the decade to come, with an outstanding statement on the need for the European economy to invest in research and innovation.
Could the Commission, together with the Presidency in charge, have done anything more than to establish a strategy, hoping that every single government would be responsible enough to make an effort to try and reach the common goal?
They could not!
The strategy was backed, it is true, by an action plan, and by the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ in order to help member states to launch the necessary reforms to reach the objective. Nonetheless, the strategy failed!
Learning from each other, best practices, joint policy initiatives and community actions should have been the outcome. In 2004 the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok was asked to present a report on the intermediate results of the Lisbon strategy. It was fairly disappointing.
The European Parliament created a special committee to discuss the role of the Lisbon agenda. A joint meeting organized with national parliaments focused on three key areas:
° sustainable energy,
° the internal market and innovation,
° human capital, job creation, education and social aspects.
Three joint meetings were organized in order to produce common statements, which were to be presented in plenary debates. One of these statements is of greater significance indeed:
A majority of important areas of policies and activities in favour of a revival of economic growth are still either entirely – or to a large extent at least – matters for national parliaments and national governments to deal with. Labor market reforms, tax systems and education remain national affairs; whereas the strategy decided in Lisbon, at the start of the new millennium, had been discussed mainly at the EU level.
Member States certainly did realize that there was an urgent need to invest in research and innovation. Each single state obtained results of its own. But investments in common actions are slow to materialize; and I dare say that the results are far from matching the money invested, and that the volume of bureaucracy created largely exceeds the success of this action.
Mr.Zapatero’s call for new powers for the commission to control the follow-up of decisions taken survived for just four days. It was silenced by Germany and the UK.
And that was the end of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’!!!
Will the Lisbon Treaty help to avoid similar situations?
The progress made over time, up to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, is to be considered on the background of major changes which have occurred in relations between Member States in recent years.
The unification of so many different states, each one representing several ethnical and cultural diverse groups of populations, is a much more demanding task than the problems faced by the pioneers in the United States, three centuries ago. We must realize that the task to unite some 500 million people in our multi-ethnic and pluralistic European Union is an absolutely formidable challenge.
Today, far reaching differences continue to exist between old and new Member States within the EU. These have indeed represented the most difficult hurdles to be overcome during the recent debates on climate change!
The Copenhagen Conference itself had to cope with the gap between developing and the industrialized countries on a global basis. Similar problems had to be dealt with within the EU as well.
Our efforts to speak with one voice must not prevent us from taking into account different realities within individual member states, before we decide on whatever actions.
In Copenhagen, the EU wanted to confirm its leadership in climate change action; it failed and was marginalized. In fact, it failed to find the unanimity needed for truly ambitious action; and after having missed the targets for innovation and research set up a decade ago, industrial leadership was out of reach, for the production of clean cars, as well as in the field of green energy.
Paraphrasing the Green Peace banner – saying that « Politicians talk, Leaders act » – we are entitled to ask: where have they been, the leaders of the EU?
Will all this change in the future?
The Treaty of Lisbon enables the Council to vote with a qualified majority, a procedure which is now extended to include new policy areas as well.
Council meetings on legislative items will be public; this means that more time will be needed to prepare its meetings, as time is also needed for secret diplomacy. Heads of government will no longer be able to hide their individual political positions behind the secrecy of decision making at the European level.
The treaty improves the EU’s ability to act in several policy areas of major priority.
Freedom, security and justice, fighting terrorism and crime will become common policies.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights protects existing citizens rights and creates new ones. Some citizens, however, will be less equal than others: political leaders in Britain, in the Czech Republic and in Poland decided to opt out of the Charter!
Let us have a closer look at the rule of majority voting in the Council. In the past, some very important decisions have been blocked because of the need for unanimity. In this context, some leaders were calling for a Europe with two speeds, in the beginning mainly for matters concerning the single currency. Originally it had been Jacques Delors’ proposal in relation with the introduction of a common currency.
In his 1970 report on the monetary policy of the European Community, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner called for the centralization of macro-economic policies, which implied the fixing of parity rates for all participating currencies as well as the complete liberation of capital. movements,
This was the beginning of what later became the single European currency. The Euro was introduced as the common currency in 2002. Not all member states had chosen to join the system. Had one tried to introduce it by public referendum, it would never have come into existence.
This example tells us that two speeds may well lead to success, provided we are ready to consider that the common currency is a success. And yes, it is indeed a great achievement in European history.
The Schengen Agreement is another example of progress with two speeds. 24 countries are currently members of a cooperation organizing free movement of its citizens. It all started in 1980, when a unanimous decision to let citizens cross borders without passport controls was hopelessly out of reach. In 1985 an agreement was first signed in Schengen, a small town in Luxembourg, on the common border with France and Germany. This intergovernmental agreement started with France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
It has become part of the EU framework in 1999.
This is yet another success story which improves citizens’ mobility within the EU.
Both examples are proof that progress is possible, when it is the will of governments to act in a common European interest, even if they have to reach beyond the feelings of their own citizens.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”, Winston Churchill once said.
I have mentioned just two examples of good governance; there have been many more in the earlier stages of the European construction.
In the course of the last 50 years, many a challenging situation has occurred. The Union has managed to survive all the dangers of breaking apart.
Progress has been slow, but it has been steady as well.
And yet, we feel dissatisfied! We do feel a real need to proceed at a higher speed.
The jurisdiction of the court in Karlsruhe has awakened national parliaments and drawn their attention to the new role they will have to play in the future.
In spite of the very different institutional status of national parliaments, each of them now has two voices to object, within 8 weeks, to a legislative EU text, whenever it is not in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity.
Any initiative taken within European institutions, by the commission, by the council and by the parliament will have to be notified to national parliaments. The latter will now have the right to oppose them. This new procedure will be quite a challenge for those who are in charge of organizing time schedules!
The Lisbon Treaty gives a stronger voice to citizens with the » citizen’s initiative », a procedure through which a minimum of one million citizens from a number of member states have the possibility to call upon the Commission to bring forward new policy proposals. Some of the relevant rules have been written down in a green paper, but for the time being, it is not quite clear yet, how this system is going to work.
The awareness that we are taking part in historical achievements, which will definitely change the face of the continent, cannot emerge from a largely procedural or technical document like the Lisbon treaty.
In spite of the moral dimension of the Charter of Human Rights, despite the emphasis on the dignity of the single person, the recognition for every single nation, the rights of minorities, the freedom of speech among others – something important is still missing.
Therefore I want to mention that parallel to the shift from the failed Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty, an initiative has been launched here in Berlin, called « A soul for Europe », taking on board the president of the European Commission and other prominent members .
In his opening speech Mr. Barroso said « The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….Europe is not only about markets, it’s also about values and culture. If the economy is a necessity for our lives, culture is really what makes our lives worth living. »
This was said in 2006. It is a perfectly correct and true statement. Today, 4 years later, after 2008, the year of intercultural dialogue – and in the midst of an economic crisis – basic questions are asked about values like truthfulness, honesty, solidarity. And yet, debates on culture are not part of common EU objectives. Matters of culture are still left to be dealt with by member states, according to the principles of subsidiarity.
Could the Lisbon treaty be used as an instrument to launch Europe’s economy?
The initiatives projected within the Lisbon strategy could have opened new perspectives for the European economy. Let us imagine that investments into research and innovation had been implemented as expected, we might well have managed to develop “the clean car”; or renewable and efficient forms of energy. And In such a case Europe would have had an opportunity to become a leader in a number of important fields which require the use of new technologies.
Alas, the political will of member states was missing. I just referred to the conclusions of the European Parliament: the most important areas for an economic revival in Europe still are for the national states to decide upon, within their own national policies. It is therefore up to national decision makers to have their decisions fit into a European context.
How will the new procedures in the treaty be able to influence decision making in this direction?
Majority votes will certainly provide possibilities to speed up decision making procedures. Procedures to consult national parliaments are still not clear at this time.
The financial crisis has shown us that urgent decisions can very well be taken quickly.
During these last months we have noticed that somehow national interests have been put forward with less insistence, despite the fact that, for instance, France and Germany massively defended her national car industry.
Trade unions organized cross border demonstrations, when Opel works were to be closed in Germany and Belgium, while heads of states indulged in rather protectionist speeches.
Monsieur Sarkozy wants to be re-elected by French citizens just as Frau Merckel wishes to win elections in Germany.
Speaking in favour of Europe is by no means always accepted, nor understood, as an answer to peoples concerns in times of rising unemployment or economic uncertainty.
And yet – Europe is definitely not the problem, it is the solution.
As a consequence, we absolutely must increase our efforts in favour of a stronger Europe and strive to convince citizens to go along that road with us. Militants must be informed, convinced and committed to the common cause!
National parliaments together with the European Parliament will have to assume their roles as legislators. On the European level their decisions must be speeded up, and implementation in member states has to be accelerated
With the introduction of the right of initiatives the Lisbon treaty has created a possibility of direct intervention for citizens.
From now on citizens will have an opportunity to act as catalysers.
So now we have a way to mobilize citizens in favour of the European cause. Democratic powers must not be diluted by the creation of ever more institutions, committees or assemblies, with a right to interfere in the democratic process. On the contrary, already existing
organisms must be reminded of their responsibilities.
With millions of unemployed, Europe needs a social policy which will take into account the situation in member states. At this stage, Europe has not clearly defined the model of society it wants to create in the end. In coming decades political leaders will have to prove that social market economy is the model which can be accepted by a large majority.
We have finished building the Europe of governments and of parliaments, the Europe with a single market and a single currency. The time has now come to create a Europe for the citizens.
New technologies allow a more direct and more intensive dialogue with citizens. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: A Europe for the citizens. Allow me to quote Jean Monnet in a speech presented in Washington in 1952: “We do not unite states, we unite men”
I want to come to a conclusion, and therefore I turn back to culture. The first official act signed by all 27 member states has been the Unesco Convention on Cultural Diversity*. Enormous efforts lie ahead of us, should we
* Official title: CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
succeed in promoting this convention’s spirit of tolerance and understanding. This challenge is more demanding and more important than all the others. For the time being, culture and education still remain in the hands of national authorities. Cooperation among citizens of different cultures will be possible only when mutual understanding prevails. Many problems will arise which cannot be done away with by European directives or resolutions. Each and every citizen will be challenged.
Any human community has its roots in a tribe or a clan, with their myths and rituals, says Claude Riveline, professor at the École des Mines in Paris.
How does culture express itself in the ways employees of a company work and think in their daily routine? How can it be felt through the company’s organization, its machine
park, its production and management techniques? Is culture a factor which determines performance?
These questions refer to the ethics of economy and of governance.
In other words, economy cannot disregard culture – or cultures rather. If the EU is willing to improve its efficiency, it absolutely must study its people’s behaviours and the links to their cultural origins.
GNP, balances of payments, inflation and unemployment are not the only factors to be considered. The wellbeing and happiness of the Union’s citizens should also become a common concern and an objective of the Union itself.
Once more, and to finish, allow me to quote Jean Monnet: « If I had to start again, I would start with culture…. »
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Decision making procedures after Lisbon
It was a great relief when the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was complete and when this was perceived as such by politicians and public opinion alike. A relief in the first place, because non ratification would have been a disastrous step back for the further implementation of common market principles; a relief as well at a time when euro-scepticism is growing, and the tiresome debate about institutional affairs is felt like a way to escape treating the core business of the European Union.
It is a fact that a broad majority of citizens is in favor of the common goals of a European Union; the ways to achieve these goals, however, remain a misty secret of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
We failed to provide the EU with a structure which would be simple enough to be easily understood. There are, however, no simple answers to complex questions, as both the history as well as the economic situation of every single member state, have to be taken into account.
European decision-making has become a succession of compromises; and finding the compromise to the compromise has become part of the secrecy of decision making processes within the European Union:
This means that a Commission proposal has to take into account national concerns, concerns of industries, sometimes strongly linked to member states interests, and citizens’ interests defended by the European Parliament. Numerous lobbyists in Brussels are continuously interfering in this decision making process.
Will the Lisbon treaty help to change all this?
That is the big question, and the answer is not easy at all, as a change of paradigm occurred between the first European treaty, signed in Rome in 1957, and the last one signed in Lisbon in December 2007.
The substantial progress achieved between those two dates, through the treaties of Amsterdam, of Maastricht and Nice, has not really been acknowledged by a larger average of Europe’s population. Eight years of a constitutional debate and often stormy disagreement have only modestly improved democracy and efficiency within the European Union. The rejection and/or renegotiation of treaties, which had already been signed by heads of states, leave question-marks: in whose name did they sign? On whose behalf did the Czech President refuse to sign, despite the fact that the ratification had been approved by the democratic institutions of his own country?
Never have questions about the efficiency of the institutions been more incisive, than after France’s and the Netherlands’ refusal to accept the so called Constitution, which had been signed in October 2004 by all heads of state, and ratified by 18 member states. In both countries, the debates during the weeks prior to the referendum have also been strongly focused on national political issues: in France it was the ‘polish plumber’, a popular expression to describe what the so called “Bolkenstein directive” had planned as a model for workers mobility within the EU . In both countries the debate was on Islam and the acceptance of Turkey as a full member of the EU. As governments of both these countries were fairly unpopular in those days, the final vote could also be seen as a sanction of national politics. In the Netherlands 80% of Parliament members were in favor of the constitution. So, what about their representation within a democracy in this situation? Voters’ participation in both referenda was much higher than in general European elections.
Public opinion, as expressed during elections, must be taken into account. Are democracies, who abandon the executive power to those who have been elected in free elections, still functioning the way they should when it comes to supranational decision-making? Is not the fact that the participation in European Parliament elections has been so very low, a strong hint that something is deeply wrong in the construction we made?
What do citizens really want, what do they know about the common problems of 27 members states, what are they told by their heads of state about decision-making in Brussels? Aren’t all bad things – which occur too often – considered to be decisions of the EU, and the good things, are they not presented as results of outstanding national performances?
It is a fact that patterns of thinking have remained national, while problems have become global. To act locally and to think globally, that is what we need to do. Will it be enough to explaining this to our citizens to generate a better understanding?
In the current economic crises the job to be done in Europe is to prevent outbreaks of national protectionism. Just imagine for a second that we would not have had a common currency in the euro zone, the financial crises would most certainly have caused much greater damage than it actually did.
This alone should have raised fresh enthusiasm for our common goals, or at least could have created a feeling for greater strength resulting from joint action, and for the urgent need to speed up the latter. Alas, the contrary is the case; protectionist tendencies have emerged in a number of member states. Citizens seem to feel more protected by their national potential, than by joint action in a union with common goals.
Two phenomena became apparent during the period of economic crises.
First: The official statements of the leaders of big member states, France, Germany and the UK. The joint press conferences of this threesome gave the impression that the three major economies had taken over exclusive leadership. They totally ignored what made the European Union so unique in the world, namely a union made of bigger, but also of smaller states, working together on an equal footing.
Second: the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe gave a serious warning when it said that the Bundestag had to be more closely involved in European legislation. As the Council of Ministers still is to be a co-legislator, does the German Government representative now have to check his decisions with the Bundestag before any Council meeting? What will time schedules for decision making have to look like in the future?
National parliaments will have a more active role to play, which raises practical questions about of how to organize the handling of initiatives taken by European Institutions.
In this respect, the basic role of the European Parliament really does not seem to be fully acknowledged by EU citizens as that of a genuine representative and democratic institution of the European construction. The Lisbon treaty has provided the EP with important new powers regarding EU legislation, EU budget and international agreements. The directly elected Parliament is now placed on an equal footing with the Council.
Greater involvement of national parliaments, as it is included in the Lisbon text, is not considered as a sufficient guarantee by the German court.
On the other hand, to say that Europe is not democratic, means to ignore all the efforts made by the last European Commission in favor of greater transparency in decision making: The debates in Parliament can be followed live on the internet, committee meetings are now open to the press, the hotline of commission services should provide answers to all the questions citizens might ask. And yet, in spite of all these possibilities of information, writing about Europe on the front page of a newspaper cuts down its circulation. Public interest in European affairs has decreased in parallel to the opening of the institutions to a wider public.
From the democratic bodies they have elected, citizens expect to be told, and to understand, what is going on; they want their elected representatives to explain what they are working on and what they are voting for. This has become a fairly impossible task for those who are closely involved in the decision making process. The wording of the European slang, filled with abbreviations, has become unintelligible to the average population. If we want this to change, the Lisbon treaty alone cannot provide the answers.
Contrary to the Constitution the Lisbon treaty does not mention the EU’s ambition to become a union of citizens, with a common citizenship, a flag, and an anthem. In the Lisbon treaty, the most frequently expressed concern of the EU, namely the « deepening before enlarging », has not been taken into account. As a consequence, the new agreement appears to be a technical improvement of the way the three main European institutions work together.
If we wish to improve the way decisions are made, we will have to start with an analysis of the recent past.
One example: The Spanish presidency started with Mr. Bean appearing on its internet homepage instead of Spain’s prime minister. And the links to the site collapsed…, thanks to the British comic..!
Apart from this joke on the net, Mr.Zapatero used his first address to the press to ask for additional powers for the Commission.
He was absolutely right to speak of a failure when he referred to the Lisbon agenda, or to the so called Lisbon strategy. Indeed, the plan to make Europe the world’s most competitive economy, approved in Lisbon in the year 2000, failed. It is a fact, that there had been no binding rules to determine the amounts to be invested in research and innovation in order to achieve the goals agreed upon.
But let us have a look at the way the decision had been taken: it was under the Portuguese Presidency, the first in the new millennium: a strong message was needed, and it was to be energetically announced by the minister in charge; and there was the wish to be present on the political agenda during the decade to come, with an outstanding statement on the need for the European economy to invest in research and innovation.
Could the Commission, together with the Presidency in charge, have done anything more than to establish a strategy, hoping that every single government would be responsible enough to make an effort to try and reach the common goal?
They could not!
The strategy was backed, it is true, by an action plan, and by the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ in order to help member states to launch the necessary reforms to reach the objective. Nonetheless, the strategy failed!
Learning from each other, best practices, joint policy initiatives and community actions should have been the outcome. In 2004 the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok was asked to present a report on the intermediate results of the Lisbon strategy. It was fairly disappointing.
The European Parliament created a special committee to discuss the role of the Lisbon agenda. A joint meeting organized with national parliaments focused on three key areas:
° sustainable energy,
° the internal market and innovation,
° human capital, job creation, education and social aspects.
Three joint meetings were organized in order to produce common statements, which were to be presented in plenary debates. One of these statements is of greater significance indeed:
A majority of important areas of policies and activities in favour of a revival of economic growth are still either entirely – or to a large extent at least – matters for national parliaments and national governments to deal with. Labor market reforms, tax systems and education remain national affairs; whereas the strategy decided in Lisbon, at the start of the new millennium, had been discussed mainly at the EU level.
Member States certainly did realize that there was an urgent need to invest in research and innovation. Each single state obtained results of its own. But investments in common actions are slow to materialize; and I dare say that the results are far from matching the money invested, and that the volume of bureaucracy created largely exceeds the success of this action.
Mr.Zapatero’s call for new powers for the commission to control the follow-up of decisions taken survived for just four days. It was silenced by Germany and the UK.
And that was the end of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’!!!
Will the Lisbon Treaty help to avoid similar situations?
The progress made over time, up to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, is to be considered on the background of major changes which have occurred in relations between Member States in recent years.
The unification of so many different states, each one representing several ethnical and cultural diverse groups of populations, is a much more demanding task than the problems faced by the pioneers in the United States, three centuries ago. We must realize that the task to unite some 500 million people in our multi-ethnic and pluralistic European Union is an absolutely formidable challenge.
Today, far reaching differences continue to exist between old and new Member States within the EU. These have indeed represented the most difficult hurdles to be overcome during the recent debates on climate change!
The Copenhagen Conference itself had to cope with the gap between developing and the industrialized countries on a global basis. Similar problems had to be dealt with within the EU as well.
Our efforts to speak with one voice must not prevent us from taking into account different realities within individual member states, before we decide on whatever actions.
In Copenhagen, the EU wanted to confirm its leadership in climate change action; it failed and was marginalized. In fact, it failed to find the unanimity needed for truly ambitious action; and after having missed the targets for innovation and research set up a decade ago, industrial leadership was out of reach, for the production of clean cars, as well as in the field of green energy.
Paraphrasing the Green Peace banner – saying that « Politicians talk, Leaders act » – we are entitled to ask: where have they been, the leaders of the EU?
Will all this change in the future?
The Treaty of Lisbon enables the Council to vote with a qualified majority, a procedure which is now extended to include new policy areas as well.
Council meetings on legislative items will be public; this means that more time will be needed to prepare its meetings, as time is also needed for secret diplomacy. Heads of government will no longer be able to hide their individual political positions behind the secrecy of decision making at the European level.
The treaty improves the EU’s ability to act in several policy areas of major priority.
Freedom, security and justice, fighting terrorism and crime will become common policies.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights protects existing citizens rights and creates new ones. Some citizens, however, will be less equal than others: political leaders in Britain, in the Czech Republic and in Poland decided to opt out of the Charter!
Let us have a closer look at the rule of majority voting in the Council. In the past, some very important decisions have been blocked because of the need for unanimity. In this context, some leaders were calling for a Europe with two speeds, in the beginning mainly for matters concerning the single currency. Originally it had been Jacques Delors’ proposal in relation with the introduction of a common currency.
In his 1970 report on the monetary policy of the European Community, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner called for the centralization of macro-economic policies, which implied the fixing of parity rates for all participating currencies as well as the complete liberation of capital. movements,
This was the beginning of what later became the single European currency. The Euro was introduced as the common currency in 2002. Not all member states had chosen to join the system. Had one tried to introduce it by public referendum, it would never have come into existence.
This example tells us that two speeds may well lead to success, provided we are ready to consider that the common currency is a success. And yes, it is indeed a great achievement in European history.
The Schengen Agreement is another example of progress with two speeds. 24 countries are currently members of a cooperation organizing free movement of its citizens. It all started in 1980, when a unanimous decision to let citizens cross borders without passport controls was hopelessly out of reach. In 1985 an agreement was first signed in Schengen, a small town in Luxembourg, on the common border with France and Germany. This intergovernmental agreement started with France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
It has become part of the EU framework in 1999.
This is yet another success story which improves citizens’ mobility within the EU.
Both examples are proof that progress is possible, when it is the will of governments to act in a common European interest, even if they have to reach beyond the feelings of their own citizens.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”, Winston Churchill once said.
I have mentioned just two examples of good governance; there have been many more in the earlier stages of the European construction.
In the course of the last 50 years, many a challenging situation has occurred. The Union has managed to survive all the dangers of breaking apart.
Progress has been slow, but it has been steady as well.
And yet, we feel dissatisfied! We do feel a real need to proceed at a higher speed.
The jurisdiction of the court in Karlsruhe has awakened national parliaments and drawn their attention to the new role they will have to play in the future.
In spite of the very different institutional status of national parliaments, each of them now has two voices to object, within 8 weeks, to a legislative EU text, whenever it is not in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity.
Any initiative taken within European institutions, by the commission, by the council and by the parliament will have to be notified to national parliaments. The latter will now have the right to oppose them. This new procedure will be quite a challenge for those who are in charge of organizing time schedules!
The Lisbon Treaty gives a stronger voice to citizens with the » citizen’s initiative », a procedure through which a minimum of one million citizens from a number of member states have the possibility to call upon the Commission to bring forward new policy proposals. Some of the relevant rules have been written down in a green paper, but for the time being, it is not quite clear yet, how this system is going to work.
The awareness that we are taking part in historical achievements, which will definitely change the face of the continent, cannot emerge from a largely procedural or technical document like the Lisbon treaty.
In spite of the moral dimension of the Charter of Human Rights, despite the emphasis on the dignity of the single person, the recognition for every single nation, the rights of minorities, the freedom of speech among others – something important is still missing.
Therefore I want to mention that parallel to the shift from the failed Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty, an initiative has been launched here in Berlin, called « A soul for Europe », taking on board the president of the European Commission and other prominent members .
In his opening speech Mr. Barroso said « The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….Europe is not only about markets, it’s also about values and culture. If the economy is a necessity for our lives, culture is really what makes our lives worth living. »
This was said in 2006. It is a perfectly correct and true statement. Today, 4 years later, after 2008, the year of intercultural dialogue – and in the midst of an economic crisis – basic questions are asked about values like truthfulness, honesty, solidarity. And yet, debates on culture are not part of common EU objectives. Matters of culture are still left to be dealt with by member states, according to the principles of subsidiarity.
Could the Lisbon treaty be used as an instrument to launch Europe’s economy?
The initiatives projected within the Lisbon strategy could have opened new perspectives for the European economy. Let us imagine that investments into research and innovation had been implemented as expected, we might well have managed to develop “the clean car”; or renewable and efficient forms of energy. And In such a case Europe would have had an opportunity to become a leader in a number of important fields which require the use of new technologies.
Alas, the political will of member states was missing. I just referred to the conclusions of the European Parliament: the most important areas for an economic revival in Europe still are for the national states to decide upon, within their own national policies. It is therefore up to national decision makers to have their decisions fit into a European context.
How will the new procedures in the treaty be able to influence decision making in this direction?
Majority votes will certainly provide possibilities to speed up decision making procedures. Procedures to consult national parliaments are still not clear at this time.
The financial crisis has shown us that urgent decisions can very well be taken quickly.
During these last months we have noticed that somehow national interests have been put forward with less insistence, despite the fact that, for instance, France and Germany massively defended her national car industry.
Trade unions organized cross border demonstrations, when Opel works were to be closed in Germany and Belgium, while heads of states indulged in rather protectionist speeches.
Monsieur Sarkozy wants to be re-elected by French citizens just as Frau Merckel wishes to win elections in Germany.
Speaking in favour of Europe is by no means always accepted, nor understood, as an answer to peoples concerns in times of rising unemployment or economic uncertainty.
And yet – Europe is definitely not the problem, it is the solution.
As a consequence, we absolutely must increase our efforts in favour of a stronger Europe and strive to convince citizens to go along that road with us. Militants must be informed, convinced and committed to the common cause!
National parliaments together with the European Parliament will have to assume their roles as legislators. On the European level their decisions must be speeded up, and implementation in member states has to be accelerated
With the introduction of the right of initiatives the Lisbon treaty has created a possibility of direct intervention for citizens.
From now on citizens will have an opportunity to act as catalysers.
So now we have a way to mobilize citizens in favour of the European cause. Democratic powers must not be diluted by the creation of ever more institutions, committees or assemblies, with a right to interfere in the democratic process. On the contrary, already existing
organisms must be reminded of their responsibilities.
With millions of unemployed, Europe needs a social policy which will take into account the situation in member states. At this stage, Europe has not clearly defined the model of society it wants to create in the end. In coming decades political leaders will have to prove that social market economy is the model which can be accepted by a large majority.
We have finished building the Europe of governments and of parliaments, the Europe with a single market and a single currency. The time has now come to create a Europe for the citizens.
New technologies allow a more direct and more intensive dialogue with citizens. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: A Europe for the citizens. Allow me to quote Jean Monnet in a speech presented in Washington in 1952: “We do not unite states, we unite men”
I want to come to a conclusion, and therefore I turn back to culture. The first official act signed by all 27 member states has been the Unesco Convention on Cultural Diversity*. Enormous efforts lie ahead of us, should we
* Official title: CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
succeed in promoting this convention’s spirit of tolerance and understanding. This challenge is more demanding and more important than all the others. For the time being, culture and education still remain in the hands of national authorities. Cooperation among citizens of different cultures will be possible only when mutual understanding prevails. Many problems will arise which cannot be done away with by European directives or resolutions. Each and every citizen will be challenged.
Any human community has its roots in a tribe or a clan, with their myths and rituals, says Claude Riveline, professor at the École des Mines in Paris.
How does culture express itself in the ways employees of a company work and think in their daily routine? How can it be felt through the company’s organization, its machine
park, its production and management techniques? Is culture a factor which determines performance?
These questions refer to the ethics of economy and of governance.
In other words, economy cannot disregard culture – or cultures rather. If the EU is willing to improve its efficiency, it absolutely must study its people’s behaviours and the links to their cultural origins.
GNP, balances of payments, inflation and unemployment are not the only factors to be considered. The wellbeing and happiness of the Union’s citizens should also become a common concern and an objective of the Union itself.
Once more, and to finish, allow me to quote Jean Monnet: « If I had to start again, I would start with culture…. »
0000000000000000000000000
BERLIN
Decision making procedures after Lisbon
It was a great relief when the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was complete and when this was perceived as such by politicians and public opinion alike. A relief in the first place, because non ratification would have been a disastrous step back for the further implementation of common market principles; a relief as well at a time when euro-scepticism is growing, and the tiresome debate about institutional affairs is felt like a way to escape treating the core business of the European Union.
It is a fact that a broad majority of citizens is in favor of the common goals of a European Union; the ways to achieve these goals, however, remain a misty secret of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
We failed to provide the EU with a structure which would be simple enough to be easily understood. There are, however, no simple answers to complex questions, as both the history as well as the economic situation of every single member state, have to be taken into account.
European decision-making has become a succession of compromises; and finding the compromise to the compromise has become part of the secrecy of decision making processes within the European Union:
This means that a Commission proposal has to take into account national concerns, concerns of industries, sometimes strongly linked to member states interests, and citizens’ interests defended by the European Parliament. Numerous lobbyists in Brussels are continuously interfering in this decision making process.
Will the Lisbon treaty help to change all this?
That is the big question, and the answer is not easy at all, as a change of paradigm occurred between the first European treaty, signed in Rome in 1957, and the last one signed in Lisbon in December 2007.
The substantial progress achieved between those two dates, through the treaties of Amsterdam, of Maastricht and Nice, has not really been acknowledged by a larger average of Europe’s population. Eight years of a constitutional debate and often stormy disagreement have only modestly improved democracy and efficiency within the European Union. The rejection and/or renegotiation of treaties, which had already been signed by heads of states, leave question-marks: in whose name did they sign? On whose behalf did the Czech President refuse to sign, despite the fact that the ratification had been approved by the democratic institutions of his own country?
Never have questions about the efficiency of the institutions been more incisive, than after France’s and the Netherlands’ refusal to accept the so called Constitution, which had been signed in October 2004 by all heads of state, and ratified by 18 member states. In both countries, the debates during the weeks prior to the referendum have also been strongly focused on national political issues: in France it was the ‘polish plumber’, a popular expression to describe what the so called “Bolkenstein directive” had planned as a model for workers mobility within the EU . In both countries the debate was on Islam and the acceptance of Turkey as a full member of the EU. As governments of both these countries were fairly unpopular in those days, the final vote could also be seen as a sanction of national politics. In the Netherlands 80% of Parliament members were in favor of the constitution. So, what about their representation within a democracy in this situation? Voters’ participation in both referenda was much higher than in general European elections.
Public opinion, as expressed during elections, must be taken into account. Are democracies, who abandon the executive power to those who have been elected in free elections, still functioning the way they should when it comes to supranational decision-making? Is not the fact that the participation in European Parliament elections has been so very low, a strong hint that something is deeply wrong in the construction we made?
What do citizens really want, what do they know about the common problems of 27 members states, what are they told by their heads of state about decision-making in Brussels? Aren’t all bad things – which occur too often – considered to be decisions of the EU, and the good things, are they not presented as results of outstanding national performances?
It is a fact that patterns of thinking have remained national, while problems have become global. To act locally and to think globally, that is what we need to do. Will it be enough to explaining this to our citizens to generate a better understanding?
In the current economic crises the job to be done in Europe is to prevent outbreaks of national protectionism. Just imagine for a second that we would not have had a common currency in the euro zone, the financial crises would most certainly have caused much greater damage than it actually did.
This alone should have raised fresh enthusiasm for our common goals, or at least could have created a feeling for greater strength resulting from joint action, and for the urgent need to speed up the latter. Alas, the contrary is the case; protectionist tendencies have emerged in a number of member states. Citizens seem to feel more protected by their national potential, than by joint action in a union with common goals.
Two phenomena became apparent during the period of economic crises.
First: The official statements of the leaders of big member states, France, Germany and the UK. The joint press conferences of this threesome gave the impression that the three major economies had taken over exclusive leadership. They totally ignored what made the European Union so unique in the world, namely a union made of bigger, but also of smaller states, working together on an equal footing.
Second: the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe gave a serious warning when it said that the Bundestag had to be more closely involved in European legislation. As the Council of Ministers still is to be a co-legislator, does the German Government representative now have to check his decisions with the Bundestag before any Council meeting? What will time schedules for decision making have to look like in the future?
National parliaments will have a more active role to play, which raises practical questions about of how to organize the handling of initiatives taken by European Institutions.
In this respect, the basic role of the European Parliament really does not seem to be fully acknowledged by EU citizens as that of a genuine representative and democratic institution of the European construction. The Lisbon treaty has provided the EP with important new powers regarding EU legislation, EU budget and international agreements. The directly elected Parliament is now placed on an equal footing with the Council.
Greater involvement of national parliaments, as it is included in the Lisbon text, is not considered as a sufficient guarantee by the German court.
On the other hand, to say that Europe is not democratic, means to ignore all the efforts made by the last European Commission in favor of greater transparency in decision making: The debates in Parliament can be followed live on the internet, committee meetings are now open to the press, the hotline of commission services should provide answers to all the questions citizens might ask. And yet, in spite of all these possibilities of information, writing about Europe on the front page of a newspaper cuts down its circulation. Public interest in European affairs has decreased in parallel to the opening of the institutions to a wider public.
From the democratic bodies they have elected, citizens expect to be told, and to understand, what is going on; they want their elected representatives to explain what they are working on and what they are voting for. This has become a fairly impossible task for those who are closely involved in the decision making process. The wording of the European slang, filled with abbreviations, has become unintelligible to the average population. If we want this to change, the Lisbon treaty alone cannot provide the answers.
Contrary to the Constitution the Lisbon treaty does not mention the EU’s ambition to become a union of citizens, with a common citizenship, a flag, and an anthem. In the Lisbon treaty, the most frequently expressed concern of the EU, namely the « deepening before enlarging », has not been taken into account. As a consequence, the new agreement appears to be a technical improvement of the way the three main European institutions work together.
If we wish to improve the way decisions are made, we will have to start with an analysis of the recent past.
One example: The Spanish presidency started with Mr. Bean appearing on its internet homepage instead of Spain’s prime minister. And the links to the site collapsed…, thanks to the British comic..!
Apart from this joke on the net, Mr.Zapatero used his first address to the press to ask for additional powers for the Commission.
He was absolutely right to speak of a failure when he referred to the Lisbon agenda, or to the so called Lisbon strategy. Indeed, the plan to make Europe the world’s most competitive economy, approved in Lisbon in the year 2000, failed. It is a fact, that there had been no binding rules to determine the amounts to be invested in research and innovation in order to achieve the goals agreed upon.
But let us have a look at the way the decision had been taken: it was under the Portuguese Presidency, the first in the new millennium: a strong message was needed, and it was to be energetically announced by the minister in charge; and there was the wish to be present on the political agenda during the decade to come, with an outstanding statement on the need for the European economy to invest in research and innovation.
Could the Commission, together with the Presidency in charge, have done anything more than to establish a strategy, hoping that every single government would be responsible enough to make an effort to try and reach the common goal?
They could not!
The strategy was backed, it is true, by an action plan, and by the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ in order to help member states to launch the necessary reforms to reach the objective. Nonetheless, the strategy failed!
Learning from each other, best practices, joint policy initiatives and community actions should have been the outcome. In 2004 the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok was asked to present a report on the intermediate results of the Lisbon strategy. It was fairly disappointing.
The European Parliament created a special committee to discuss the role of the Lisbon agenda. A joint meeting organized with national parliaments focused on three key areas:
° sustainable energy,
° the internal market and innovation,
° human capital, job creation, education and social aspects.
Three joint meetings were organized in order to produce common statements, which were to be presented in plenary debates. One of these statements is of greater significance indeed:
A majority of important areas of policies and activities in favour of a revival of economic growth are still either entirely – or to a large extent at least – matters for national parliaments and national governments to deal with. Labor market reforms, tax systems and education remain national affairs; whereas the strategy decided in Lisbon, at the start of the new millennium, had been discussed mainly at the EU level.
Member States certainly did realize that there was an urgent need to invest in research and innovation. Each single state obtained results of its own. But investments in common actions are slow to materialize; and I dare say that the results are far from matching the money invested, and that the volume of bureaucracy created largely exceeds the success of this action.
Mr.Zapatero’s call for new powers for the commission to control the follow-up of decisions taken survived for just four days. It was silenced by Germany and the UK.
And that was the end of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’!!!
Will the Lisbon Treaty help to avoid similar situations?
The progress made over time, up to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, is to be considered on the background of major changes which have occurred in relations between Member States in recent years.
The unification of so many different states, each one representing several ethnical and cultural diverse groups of populations, is a much more demanding task than the problems faced by the pioneers in the United States, three centuries ago. We must realize that the task to unite some 500 million people in our multi-ethnic and pluralistic European Union is an absolutely formidable challenge.
Today, far reaching differences continue to exist between old and new Member States within the EU. These have indeed represented the most difficult hurdles to be overcome during the recent debates on climate change!
The Copenhagen Conference itself had to cope with the gap between developing and the industrialized countries on a global basis. Similar problems had to be dealt with within the EU as well.
Our efforts to speak with one voice must not prevent us from taking into account different realities within individual member states, before we decide on whatever actions.
In Copenhagen, the EU wanted to confirm its leadership in climate change action; it failed and was marginalized. In fact, it failed to find the unanimity needed for truly ambitious action; and after having missed the targets for innovation and research set up a decade ago, industrial leadership was out of reach, for the production of clean cars, as well as in the field of green energy.
Paraphrasing the Green Peace banner – saying that « Politicians talk, Leaders act » – we are entitled to ask: where have they been, the leaders of the EU?
Will all this change in the future?
The Treaty of Lisbon enables the Council to vote with a qualified majority, a procedure which is now extended to include new policy areas as well.
Council meetings on legislative items will be public; this means that more time will be needed to prepare its meetings, as time is also needed for secret diplomacy. Heads of government will no longer be able to hide their individual political positions behind the secrecy of decision making at the European level.
The treaty improves the EU’s ability to act in several policy areas of major priority.
Freedom, security and justice, fighting terrorism and crime will become common policies.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights protects existing citizens rights and creates new ones. Some citizens, however, will be less equal than others: political leaders in Britain, in the Czech Republic and in Poland decided to opt out of the Charter!
Let us have a closer look at the rule of majority voting in the Council. In the past, some very important decisions have been blocked because of the need for unanimity. In this context, some leaders were calling for a Europe with two speeds, in the beginning mainly for matters concerning the single currency. Originally it had been Jacques Delors’ proposal in relation with the introduction of a common currency.
In his 1970 report on the monetary policy of the European Community, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner called for the centralization of macro-economic policies, which implied the fixing of parity rates for all participating currencies as well as the complete liberation of capital. movements,
This was the beginning of what later became the single European currency. The Euro was introduced as the common currency in 2002. Not all member states had chosen to join the system. Had one tried to introduce it by public referendum, it would never have come into existence.
This example tells us that two speeds may well lead to success, provided we are ready to consider that the common currency is a success. And yes, it is indeed a great achievement in European history.
The Schengen Agreement is another example of progress with two speeds. 24 countries are currently members of a cooperation organizing free movement of its citizens. It all started in 1980, when a unanimous decision to let citizens cross borders without passport controls was hopelessly out of reach. In 1985 an agreement was first signed in Schengen, a small town in Luxembourg, on the common border with France and Germany. This intergovernmental agreement started with France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
It has become part of the EU framework in 1999.
This is yet another success story which improves citizens’ mobility within the EU.
Both examples are proof that progress is possible, when it is the will of governments to act in a common European interest, even if they have to reach beyond the feelings of their own citizens.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”, Winston Churchill once said.
I have mentioned just two examples of good governance; there have been many more in the earlier stages of the European construction.
In the course of the last 50 years, many a challenging situation has occurred. The Union has managed to survive all the dangers of breaking apart.
Progress has been slow, but it has been steady as well.
And yet, we feel dissatisfied! We do feel a real need to proceed at a higher speed.
The jurisdiction of the court in Karlsruhe has awakened national parliaments and drawn their attention to the new role they will have to play in the future.
In spite of the very different institutional status of national parliaments, each of them now has two voices to object, within 8 weeks, to a legislative EU text, whenever it is not in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity.
Any initiative taken within European institutions, by the commission, by the council and by the parliament will have to be notified to national parliaments. The latter will now have the right to oppose them. This new procedure will be quite a challenge for those who are in charge of organizing time schedules!
The Lisbon Treaty gives a stronger voice to citizens with the » citizen’s initiative », a procedure through which a minimum of one million citizens from a number of member states have the possibility to call upon the Commission to bring forward new policy proposals. Some of the relevant rules have been written down in a green paper, but for the time being, it is not quite clear yet, how this system is going to work.
The awareness that we are taking part in historical achievements, which will definitely change the face of the continent, cannot emerge from a largely procedural or technical document like the Lisbon treaty.
In spite of the moral dimension of the Charter of Human Rights, despite the emphasis on the dignity of the single person, the recognition for every single nation, the rights of minorities, the freedom of speech among others – something important is still missing.
Therefore I want to mention that parallel to the shift from the failed Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty, an initiative has been launched here in Berlin, called « A soul for Europe », taking on board the president of the European Commission and other prominent members .
In his opening speech Mr. Barroso said « The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….Europe is not only about markets, it’s also about values and culture. If the economy is a necessity for our lives, culture is really what makes our lives worth living. »
This was said in 2006. It is a perfectly correct and true statement. Today, 4 years later, after 2008, the year of intercultural dialogue – and in the midst of an economic crisis – basic questions are asked about values like truthfulness, honesty, solidarity. And yet, debates on culture are not part of common EU objectives. Matters of culture are still left to be dealt with by member states, according to the principles of subsidiarity.
Could the Lisbon treaty be used as an instrument to launch Europe’s economy?
The initiatives projected within the Lisbon strategy could have opened new perspectives for the European economy. Let us imagine that investments into research and innovation had been implemented as expected, we might well have managed to develop “the clean car”; or renewable and efficient forms of energy. And In such a case Europe would have had an opportunity to become a leader in a number of important fields which require the use of new technologies.
Alas, the political will of member states was missing. I just referred to the conclusions of the European Parliament: the most important areas for an economic revival in Europe still are for the national states to decide upon, within their own national policies. It is therefore up to national decision makers to have their decisions fit into a European context.
How will the new procedures in the treaty be able to influence decision making in this direction?
Majority votes will certainly provide possibilities to speed up decision making procedures. Procedures to consult national parliaments are still not clear at this time.
The financial crisis has shown us that urgent decisions can very well be taken quickly.
During these last months we have noticed that somehow national interests have been put forward with less insistence, despite the fact that, for instance, France and Germany massively defended her national car industry.
Trade unions organized cross border demonstrations, when Opel works were to be closed in Germany and Belgium, while heads of states indulged in rather protectionist speeches.
Monsieur Sarkozy wants to be re-elected by French citizens just as Frau Merckel wishes to win elections in Germany.
Speaking in favour of Europe is by no means always accepted, nor understood, as an answer to peoples concerns in times of rising unemployment or economic uncertainty.
And yet – Europe is definitely not the problem, it is the solution.
As a consequence, we absolutely must increase our efforts in favour of a stronger Europe and strive to convince citizens to go along that road with us. Militants must be informed, convinced and committed to the common cause!
National parliaments together with the European Parliament will have to assume their roles as legislators. On the European level their decisions must be speeded up, and implementation in member states has to be accelerated
With the introduction of the right of initiatives the Lisbon treaty has created a possibility of direct intervention for citizens.
From now on citizens will have an opportunity to act as catalysers.
So now we have a way to mobilize citizens in favour of the European cause. Democratic powers must not be diluted by the creation of ever more institutions, committees or assemblies, with a right to interfere in the democratic process. On the contrary, already existing
organisms must be reminded of their responsibilities.
With millions of unemployed, Europe needs a social policy which will take into account the situation in member states. At this stage, Europe has not clearly defined the model of society it wants to create in the end. In coming decades political leaders will have to prove that social market economy is the model which can be accepted by a large majority.
We have finished building the Europe of governments and of parliaments, the Europe with a single market and a single currency. The time has now come to create a Europe for the citizens.
New technologies allow a more direct and more intensive dialogue with citizens. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: A Europe for the citizens. Allow me to quote Jean Monnet in a speech presented in Washington in 1952: “We do not unite states, we unite men”
I want to come to a conclusion, and therefore I turn back to culture. The first official act signed by all 27 member states has been the Unesco Convention on Cultural Diversity*. Enormous efforts lie ahead of us, should we
* Official title: CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
succeed in promoting this convention’s spirit of tolerance and understanding. This challenge is more demanding and more important than all the others. For the time being, culture and education still remain in the hands of national authorities. Cooperation among citizens of different cultures will be possible only when mutual understanding prevails. Many problems will arise which cannot be done away with by European directives or resolutions. Each and every citizen will be challenged.
Any human community has its roots in a tribe or a clan, with their myths and rituals, says Claude Riveline, professor at the École des Mines in Paris.
How does culture express itself in the ways employees of a company work and think in their daily routine? How can it be felt through the company’s organization, its machine
park, its production and management techniques? Is culture a factor which determines performance?
These questions refer to the ethics of economy and of governance.
In other words, economy cannot disregard culture – or cultures rather. If the EU is willing to improve its efficiency, it absolutely must study its people’s behaviours and the links to their cultural origins.
GNP, balances of payments, inflation and unemployment are not the only factors to be considered. The wellbeing and happiness of the Union’s citizens should also become a common concern and an objective of the Union itself.
Once more, and to finish, allow me to quote Jean Monnet: « If I had to start again, I would start with culture…. »
0000000000000000000000000
BERLIN
Decision making procedures after Lisbon
It was a great relief when the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was complete and when this was perceived as such by politicians and public opinion alike. A relief in the first place, because non ratification would have been a disastrous step back for the further implementation of common market principles; a relief as well at a time when euro-scepticism is growing, and the tiresome debate about institutional affairs is felt like a way to escape treating the core business of the European Union.
It is a fact that a broad majority of citizens is in favor of the common goals of a European Union; the ways to achieve these goals, however, remain a misty secret of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
We failed to provide the EU with a structure which would be simple enough to be easily understood. There are, however, no simple answers to complex questions, as both the history as well as the economic situation of every single member state, have to be taken into account.
European decision-making has become a succession of compromises; and finding the compromise to the compromise has become part of the secrecy of decision making processes within the European Union:
This means that a Commission proposal has to take into account national concerns, concerns of industries, sometimes strongly linked to member states interests, and citizens’ interests defended by the European Parliament. Numerous lobbyists in Brussels are continuously interfering in this decision making process.
Will the Lisbon treaty help to change all this?
That is the big question, and the answer is not easy at all, as a change of paradigm occurred between the first European treaty, signed in Rome in 1957, and the last one signed in Lisbon in December 2007.
The substantial progress achieved between those two dates, through the treaties of Amsterdam, of Maastricht and Nice, has not really been acknowledged by a larger average of Europe’s population. Eight years of a constitutional debate and often stormy disagreement have only modestly improved democracy and efficiency within the European Union. The rejection and/or renegotiation of treaties, which had already been signed by heads of states, leave question-marks: in whose name did they sign? On whose behalf did the Czech President refuse to sign, despite the fact that the ratification had been approved by the democratic institutions of his own country?
Never have questions about the efficiency of the institutions been more incisive, than after France’s and the Netherlands’ refusal to accept the so called Constitution, which had been signed in October 2004 by all heads of state, and ratified by 18 member states. In both countries, the debates during the weeks prior to the referendum have also been strongly focused on national political issues: in France it was the ‘polish plumber’, a popular expression to describe what the so called “Bolkenstein directive” had planned as a model for workers mobility within the EU . In both countries the debate was on Islam and the acceptance of Turkey as a full member of the EU. As governments of both these countries were fairly unpopular in those days, the final vote could also be seen as a sanction of national politics. In the Netherlands 80% of Parliament members were in favor of the constitution. So, what about their representation within a democracy in this situation? Voters’ participation in both referenda was much higher than in general European elections.
Public opinion, as expressed during elections, must be taken into account. Are democracies, who abandon the executive power to those who have been elected in free elections, still functioning the way they should when it comes to supranational decision-making? Is not the fact that the participation in European Parliament elections has been so very low, a strong hint that something is deeply wrong in the construction we made?
What do citizens really want, what do they know about the common problems of 27 members states, what are they told by their heads of state about decision-making in Brussels? Aren’t all bad things – which occur too often – considered to be decisions of the EU, and the good things, are they not presented as results of outstanding national performances?
It is a fact that patterns of thinking have remained national, while problems have become global. To act locally and to think globally, that is what we need to do. Will it be enough to explaining this to our citizens to generate a better understanding?
In the current economic crises the job to be done in Europe is to prevent outbreaks of national protectionism. Just imagine for a second that we would not have had a common currency in the euro zone, the financial crises would most certainly have caused much greater damage than it actually did.
This alone should have raised fresh enthusiasm for our common goals, or at least could have created a feeling for greater strength resulting from joint action, and for the urgent need to speed up the latter. Alas, the contrary is the case; protectionist tendencies have emerged in a number of member states. Citizens seem to feel more protected by their national potential, than by joint action in a union with common goals.
Two phenomena became apparent during the period of economic crises.
First: The official statements of the leaders of big member states, France, Germany and the UK. The joint press conferences of this threesome gave the impression that the three major economies had taken over exclusive leadership. They totally ignored what made the European Union so unique in the world, namely a union made of bigger, but also of smaller states, working together on an equal footing.
Second: the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe gave a serious warning when it said that the Bundestag had to be more closely involved in European legislation. As the Council of Ministers still is to be a co-legislator, does the German Government representative now have to check his decisions with the Bundestag before any Council meeting? What will time schedules for decision making have to look like in the future?
National parliaments will have a more active role to play, which raises practical questions about of how to organize the handling of initiatives taken by European Institutions.
In this respect, the basic role of the European Parliament really does not seem to be fully acknowledged by EU citizens as that of a genuine representative and democratic institution of the European construction. The Lisbon treaty has provided the EP with important new powers regarding EU legislation, EU budget and international agreements. The directly elected Parliament is now placed on an equal footing with the Council.
Greater involvement of national parliaments, as it is included in the Lisbon text, is not considered as a sufficient guarantee by the German court.
On the other hand, to say that Europe is not democratic, means to ignore all the efforts made by the last European Commission in favor of greater transparency in decision making: The debates in Parliament can be followed live on the internet, committee meetings are now open to the press, the hotline of commission services should provide answers to all the questions citizens might ask. And yet, in spite of all these possibilities of information, writing about Europe on the front page of a newspaper cuts down its circulation. Public interest in European affairs has decreased in parallel to the opening of the institutions to a wider public.
From the democratic bodies they have elected, citizens expect to be told, and to understand, what is going on; they want their elected representatives to explain what they are working on and what they are voting for. This has become a fairly impossible task for those who are closely involved in the decision making process. The wording of the European slang, filled with abbreviations, has become unintelligible to the average population. If we want this to change, the Lisbon treaty alone cannot provide the answers.
Contrary to the Constitution the Lisbon treaty does not mention the EU’s ambition to become a union of citizens, with a common citizenship, a flag, and an anthem. In the Lisbon treaty, the most frequently expressed concern of the EU, namely the « deepening before enlarging », has not been taken into account. As a consequence, the new agreement appears to be a technical improvement of the way the three main European institutions work together.
If we wish to improve the way decisions are made, we will have to start with an analysis of the recent past.
One example: The Spanish presidency started with Mr. Bean appearing on its internet homepage instead of Spain’s prime minister. And the links to the site collapsed…, thanks to the British comic..!
Apart from this joke on the net, Mr.Zapatero used his first address to the press to ask for additional powers for the Commission.
He was absolutely right to speak of a failure when he referred to the Lisbon agenda, or to the so called Lisbon strategy. Indeed, the plan to make Europe the world’s most competitive economy, approved in Lisbon in the year 2000, failed. It is a fact, that there had been no binding rules to determine the amounts to be invested in research and innovation in order to achieve the goals agreed upon.
But let us have a look at the way the decision had been taken: it was under the Portuguese Presidency, the first in the new millennium: a strong message was needed, and it was to be energetically announced by the minister in charge; and there was the wish to be present on the political agenda during the decade to come, with an outstanding statement on the need for the European economy to invest in research and innovation.
Could the Commission, together with the Presidency in charge, have done anything more than to establish a strategy, hoping that every single government would be responsible enough to make an effort to try and reach the common goal?
They could not!
The strategy was backed, it is true, by an action plan, and by the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ in order to help member states to launch the necessary reforms to reach the objective. Nonetheless, the strategy failed!
Learning from each other, best practices, joint policy initiatives and community actions should have been the outcome. In 2004 the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok was asked to present a report on the intermediate results of the Lisbon strategy. It was fairly disappointing.
The European Parliament created a special committee to discuss the role of the Lisbon agenda. A joint meeting organized with national parliaments focused on three key areas:
° sustainable energy,
° the internal market and innovation,
° human capital, job creation, education and social aspects.
Three joint meetings were organized in order to produce common statements, which were to be presented in plenary debates. One of these statements is of greater significance indeed:
A majority of important areas of policies and activities in favour of a revival of economic growth are still either entirely – or to a large extent at least – matters for national parliaments and national governments to deal with. Labor market reforms, tax systems and education remain national affairs; whereas the strategy decided in Lisbon, at the start of the new millennium, had been discussed mainly at the EU level.
Member States certainly did realize that there was an urgent need to invest in research and innovation. Each single state obtained results of its own. But investments in common actions are slow to materialize; and I dare say that the results are far from matching the money invested, and that the volume of bureaucracy created largely exceeds the success of this action.
Mr.Zapatero’s call for new powers for the commission to control the follow-up of decisions taken survived for just four days. It was silenced by Germany and the UK.
And that was the end of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’!!!
Will the Lisbon Treaty help to avoid similar situations?
The progress made over time, up to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, is to be considered on the background of major changes which have occurred in relations between Member States in recent years.
The unification of so many different states, each one representing several ethnical and cultural diverse groups of populations, is a much more demanding task than the problems faced by the pioneers in the United States, three centuries ago. We must realize that the task to unite some 500 million people in our multi-ethnic and pluralistic European Union is an absolutely formidable challenge.
Today, far reaching differences continue to exist between old and new Member States within the EU. These have indeed represented the most difficult hurdles to be overcome during the recent debates on climate change!
The Copenhagen Conference itself had to cope with the gap between developing and the industrialized countries on a global basis. Similar problems had to be dealt with within the EU as well.
Our efforts to speak with one voice must not prevent us from taking into account different realities within individual member states, before we decide on whatever actions.
In Copenhagen, the EU wanted to confirm its leadership in climate change action; it failed and was marginalized. In fact, it failed to find the unanimity needed for truly ambitious action; and after having missed the targets for innovation and research set up a decade ago, industrial leadership was out of reach, for the production of clean cars, as well as in the field of green energy.
Paraphrasing the Green Peace banner – saying that « Politicians talk, Leaders act » – we are entitled to ask: where have they been, the leaders of the EU?
Will all this change in the future?
The Treaty of Lisbon enables the Council to vote with a qualified majority, a procedure which is now extended to include new policy areas as well.
Council meetings on legislative items will be public; this means that more time will be needed to prepare its meetings, as time is also needed for secret diplomacy. Heads of government will no longer be able to hide their individual political positions behind the secrecy of decision making at the European level.
The treaty improves the EU’s ability to act in several policy areas of major priority.
Freedom, security and justice, fighting terrorism and crime will become common policies.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights protects existing citizens rights and creates new ones. Some citizens, however, will be less equal than others: political leaders in Britain, in the Czech Republic and in Poland decided to opt out of the Charter!
Let us have a closer look at the rule of majority voting in the Council. In the past, some very important decisions have been blocked because of the need for unanimity. In this context, some leaders were calling for a Europe with two speeds, in the beginning mainly for matters concerning the single currency. Originally it had been Jacques Delors’ proposal in relation with the introduction of a common currency.
In his 1970 report on the monetary policy of the European Community, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner called for the centralization of macro-economic policies, which implied the fixing of parity rates for all participating currencies as well as the complete liberation of capital. movements,
This was the beginning of what later became the single European currency. The Euro was introduced as the common currency in 2002. Not all member states had chosen to join the system. Had one tried to introduce it by public referendum, it would never have come into existence.
This example tells us that two speeds may well lead to success, provided we are ready to consider that the common currency is a success. And yes, it is indeed a great achievement in European history.
The Schengen Agreement is another example of progress with two speeds. 24 countries are currently members of a cooperation organizing free movement of its citizens. It all started in 1980, when a unanimous decision to let citizens cross borders without passport controls was hopelessly out of reach. In 1985 an agreement was first signed in Schengen, a small town in Luxembourg, on the common border with France and Germany. This intergovernmental agreement started with France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
It has become part of the EU framework in 1999.
This is yet another success story which improves citizens’ mobility within the EU.
Both examples are proof that progress is possible, when it is the will of governments to act in a common European interest, even if they have to reach beyond the feelings of their own citizens.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”, Winston Churchill once said.
I have mentioned just two examples of good governance; there have been many more in the earlier stages of the European construction.
In the course of the last 50 years, many a challenging situation has occurred. The Union has managed to survive all the dangers of breaking apart.
Progress has been slow, but it has been steady as well.
And yet, we feel dissatisfied! We do feel a real need to proceed at a higher speed.
The jurisdiction of the court in Karlsruhe has awakened national parliaments and drawn their attention to the new role they will have to play in the future.
In spite of the very different institutional status of national parliaments, each of them now has two voices to object, within 8 weeks, to a legislative EU text, whenever it is not in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity.
Any initiative taken within European institutions, by the commission, by the council and by the parliament will have to be notified to national parliaments. The latter will now have the right to oppose them. This new procedure will be quite a challenge for those who are in charge of organizing time schedules!
The Lisbon Treaty gives a stronger voice to citizens with the » citizen’s initiative », a procedure through which a minimum of one million citizens from a number of member states have the possibility to call upon the Commission to bring forward new policy proposals. Some of the relevant rules have been written down in a green paper, but for the time being, it is not quite clear yet, how this system is going to work.
The awareness that we are taking part in historical achievements, which will definitely change the face of the continent, cannot emerge from a largely procedural or technical document like the Lisbon treaty.
In spite of the moral dimension of the Charter of Human Rights, despite the emphasis on the dignity of the single person, the recognition for every single nation, the rights of minorities, the freedom of speech among others – something important is still missing.
Therefore I want to mention that parallel to the shift from the failed Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty, an initiative has been launched here in Berlin, called « A soul for Europe », taking on board the president of the European Commission and other prominent members .
In his opening speech Mr. Barroso said « The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….Europe is not only about markets, it’s also about values and culture. If the economy is a necessity for our lives, culture is really what makes our lives worth living. »
This was said in 2006. It is a perfectly correct and true statement. Today, 4 years later, after 2008, the year of intercultural dialogue – and in the midst of an economic crisis – basic questions are asked about values like truthfulness, honesty, solidarity. And yet, debates on culture are not part of common EU objectives. Matters of culture are still left to be dealt with by member states, according to the principles of subsidiarity.
Could the Lisbon treaty be used as an instrument to launch Europe’s economy?
The initiatives projected within the Lisbon strategy could have opened new perspectives for the European economy. Let us imagine that investments into research and innovation had been implemented as expected, we might well have managed to develop “the clean car”; or renewable and efficient forms of energy. And In such a case Europe would have had an opportunity to become a leader in a number of important fields which require the use of new technologies.
Alas, the political will of member states was missing. I just referred to the conclusions of the European Parliament: the most important areas for an economic revival in Europe still are for the national states to decide upon, within their own national policies. It is therefore up to national decision makers to have their decisions fit into a European context.
How will the new procedures in the treaty be able to influence decision making in this direction?
Majority votes will certainly provide possibilities to speed up decision making procedures. Procedures to consult national parliaments are still not clear at this time.
The financial crisis has shown us that urgent decisions can very well be taken quickly.
During these last months we have noticed that somehow national interests have been put forward with less insistence, despite the fact that, for instance, France and Germany massively defended her national car industry.
Trade unions organized cross border demonstrations, when Opel works were to be closed in Germany and Belgium, while heads of states indulged in rather protectionist speeches.
Monsieur Sarkozy wants to be re-elected by French citizens just as Frau Merckel wishes to win elections in Germany.
Speaking in favour of Europe is by no means always accepted, nor understood, as an answer to peoples concerns in times of rising unemployment or economic uncertainty.
And yet – Europe is definitely not the problem, it is the solution.
As a consequence, we absolutely must increase our efforts in favour of a stronger Europe and strive to convince citizens to go along that road with us. Militants must be informed, convinced and committed to the common cause!
National parliaments together with the European Parliament will have to assume their roles as legislators. On the European level their decisions must be speeded up, and implementation in member states has to be accelerated
With the introduction of the right of initiatives the Lisbon treaty has created a possibility of direct intervention for citizens.
From now on citizens will have an opportunity to act as catalysers.
So now we have a way to mobilize citizens in favour of the European cause. Democratic powers must not be diluted by the creation of ever more institutions, committees or assemblies, with a right to interfere in the democratic process. On the contrary, already existing
organisms must be reminded of their responsibilities.
With millions of unemployed, Europe needs a social policy which will take into account the situation in member states. At this stage, Europe has not clearly defined the model of society it wants to create in the end. In coming decades political leaders will have to prove that social market economy is the model which can be accepted by a large majority.
We have finished building the Europe of governments and of parliaments, the Europe with a single market and a single currency. The time has now come to create a Europe for the citizens.
New technologies allow a more direct and more intensive dialogue with citizens. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: A Europe for the citizens. Allow me to quote Jean Monnet in a speech presented in Washington in 1952: “We do not unite states, we unite men”
I want to come to a conclusion, and therefore I turn back to culture. The first official act signed by all 27 member states has been the Unesco Convention on Cultural Diversity*. Enormous efforts lie ahead of us, should we
* Official title: CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
succeed in promoting this convention’s spirit of tolerance and understanding. This challenge is more demanding and more important than all the others. For the time being, culture and education still remain in the hands of national authorities. Cooperation among citizens of different cultures will be possible only when mutual understanding prevails. Many problems will arise which cannot be done away with by European directives or resolutions. Each and every citizen will be challenged.
Any human community has its roots in a tribe or a clan, with their myths and rituals, says Claude Riveline, professor at the École des Mines in Paris.
How does culture express itself in the ways employees of a company work and think in their daily routine? How can it be felt through the company’s organization, its machine
park, its production and management techniques? Is culture a factor which determines performance?
These questions refer to the ethics of economy and of governance.
In other words, economy cannot disregard culture – or cultures rather. If the EU is willing to improve its efficiency, it absolutely must study its people’s behaviours and the links to their cultural origins.
GNP, balances of payments, inflation and unemployment are not the only factors to be considered. The wellbeing and happiness of the Union’s citizens should also become a common concern and an objective of the Union itself.
Once more, and to finish, allow me to quote Jean Monnet: « If I had to start again, I would start with culture…. »
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Decision making procedures after Lisbon
It was a great relief when the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was complete and when this was perceived as such by politicians and public opinion alike. A relief in the first place, because non ratification would have been a disastrous step back for the further implementation of common market principles; a relief as well at a time when euro-scepticism is growing, and the tiresome debate about institutional affairs is felt like a way to escape treating the core business of the European Union.
It is a fact that a broad majority of citizens is in favor of the common goals of a European Union; the ways to achieve these goals, however, remain a misty secret of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
We failed to provide the EU with a structure which would be simple enough to be easily understood. There are, however, no simple answers to complex questions, as both the history as well as the economic situation of every single member state, have to be taken into account.
European decision-making has become a succession of compromises; and finding the compromise to the compromise has become part of the secrecy of decision making processes within the European Union:
This means that a Commission proposal has to take into account national concerns, concerns of industries, sometimes strongly linked to member states interests, and citizens’ interests defended by the European Parliament. Numerous lobbyists in Brussels are continuously interfering in this decision making process.
Will the Lisbon treaty help to change all this?
That is the big question, and the answer is not easy at all, as a change of paradigm occurred between the first European treaty, signed in Rome in 1957, and the last one signed in Lisbon in December 2007.
The substantial progress achieved between those two dates, through the treaties of Amsterdam, of Maastricht and Nice, has not really been acknowledged by a larger average of Europe’s population. Eight years of a constitutional debate and often stormy disagreement have only modestly improved democracy and efficiency within the European Union. The rejection and/or renegotiation of treaties, which had already been signed by heads of states, leave question-marks: in whose name did they sign? On whose behalf did the Czech President refuse to sign, despite the fact that the ratification had been approved by the democratic institutions of his own country?
Never have questions about the efficiency of the institutions been more incisive, than after France’s and the Netherlands’ refusal to accept the so called Constitution, which had been signed in October 2004 by all heads of state, and ratified by 18 member states. In both countries, the debates during the weeks prior to the referendum have also been strongly focused on national political issues: in France it was the ‘polish plumber’, a popular expression to describe what the so called “Bolkenstein directive” had planned as a model for workers mobility within the EU . In both countries the debate was on Islam and the acceptance of Turkey as a full member of the EU. As governments of both these countries were fairly unpopular in those days, the final vote could also be seen as a sanction of national politics. In the Netherlands 80% of Parliament members were in favor of the constitution. So, what about their representation within a democracy in this situation? Voters’ participation in both referenda was much higher than in general European elections.
Public opinion, as expressed during elections, must be taken into account. Are democracies, who abandon the executive power to those who have been elected in free elections, still functioning the way they should when it comes to supranational decision-making? Is not the fact that the participation in European Parliament elections has been so very low, a strong hint that something is deeply wrong in the construction we made?
What do citizens really want, what do they know about the common problems of 27 members states, what are they told by their heads of state about decision-making in Brussels? Aren’t all bad things – which occur too often – considered to be decisions of the EU, and the good things, are they not presented as results of outstanding national performances?
It is a fact that patterns of thinking have remained national, while problems have become global. To act locally and to think globally, that is what we need to do. Will it be enough to explaining this to our citizens to generate a better understanding?
In the current economic crises the job to be done in Europe is to prevent outbreaks of national protectionism. Just imagine for a second that we would not have had a common currency in the euro zone, the financial crises would most certainly have caused much greater damage than it actually did.
This alone should have raised fresh enthusiasm for our common goals, or at least could have created a feeling for greater strength resulting from joint action, and for the urgent need to speed up the latter. Alas, the contrary is the case; protectionist tendencies have emerged in a number of member states. Citizens seem to feel more protected by their national potential, than by joint action in a union with common goals.
Two phenomena became apparent during the period of economic crises.
First: The official statements of the leaders of big member states, France, Germany and the UK. The joint press conferences of this threesome gave the impression that the three major economies had taken over exclusive leadership. They totally ignored what made the European Union so unique in the world, namely a union made of bigger, but also of smaller states, working together on an equal footing.
Second: the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe gave a serious warning when it said that the Bundestag had to be more closely involved in European legislation. As the Council of Ministers still is to be a co-legislator, does the German Government representative now have to check his decisions with the Bundestag before any Council meeting? What will time schedules for decision making have to look like in the future?
National parliaments will have a more active role to play, which raises practical questions about of how to organize the handling of initiatives taken by European Institutions.
In this respect, the basic role of the European Parliament really does not seem to be fully acknowledged by EU citizens as that of a genuine representative and democratic institution of the European construction. The Lisbon treaty has provided the EP with important new powers regarding EU legislation, EU budget and international agreements. The directly elected Parliament is now placed on an equal footing with the Council.
Greater involvement of national parliaments, as it is included in the Lisbon text, is not considered as a sufficient guarantee by the German court.
On the other hand, to say that Europe is not democratic, means to ignore all the efforts made by the last European Commission in favor of greater transparency in decision making: The debates in Parliament can be followed live on the internet, committee meetings are now open to the press, the hotline of commission services should provide answers to all the questions citizens might ask. And yet, in spite of all these possibilities of information, writing about Europe on the front page of a newspaper cuts down its circulation. Public interest in European affairs has decreased in parallel to the opening of the institutions to a wider public.
From the democratic bodies they have elected, citizens expect to be told, and to understand, what is going on; they want their elected representatives to explain what they are working on and what they are voting for. This has become a fairly impossible task for those who are closely involved in the decision making process. The wording of the European slang, filled with abbreviations, has become unintelligible to the average population. If we want this to change, the Lisbon treaty alone cannot provide the answers.
Contrary to the Constitution the Lisbon treaty does not mention the EU’s ambition to become a union of citizens, with a common citizenship, a flag, and an anthem. In the Lisbon treaty, the most frequently expressed concern of the EU, namely the « deepening before enlarging », has not been taken into account. As a consequence, the new agreement appears to be a technical improvement of the way the three main European institutions work together.
If we wish to improve the way decisions are made, we will have to start with an analysis of the recent past.
One example: The Spanish presidency started with Mr. Bean appearing on its internet homepage instead of Spain’s prime minister. And the links to the site collapsed…, thanks to the British comic..!
Apart from this joke on the net, Mr.Zapatero used his first address to the press to ask for additional powers for the Commission.
He was absolutely right to speak of a failure when he referred to the Lisbon agenda, or to the so called Lisbon strategy. Indeed, the plan to make Europe the world’s most competitive economy, approved in Lisbon in the year 2000, failed. It is a fact, that there had been no binding rules to determine the amounts to be invested in research and innovation in order to achieve the goals agreed upon.
But let us have a look at the way the decision had been taken: it was under the Portuguese Presidency, the first in the new millennium: a strong message was needed, and it was to be energetically announced by the minister in charge; and there was the wish to be present on the political agenda during the decade to come, with an outstanding statement on the need for the European economy to invest in research and innovation.
Could the Commission, together with the Presidency in charge, have done anything more than to establish a strategy, hoping that every single government would be responsible enough to make an effort to try and reach the common goal?
They could not!
The strategy was backed, it is true, by an action plan, and by the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ in order to help member states to launch the necessary reforms to reach the objective. Nonetheless, the strategy failed!
Learning from each other, best practices, joint policy initiatives and community actions should have been the outcome. In 2004 the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok was asked to present a report on the intermediate results of the Lisbon strategy. It was fairly disappointing.
The European Parliament created a special committee to discuss the role of the Lisbon agenda. A joint meeting organized with national parliaments focused on three key areas:
° sustainable energy,
° the internal market and innovation,
° human capital, job creation, education and social aspects.
Three joint meetings were organized in order to produce common statements, which were to be presented in plenary debates. One of these statements is of greater significance indeed:
A majority of important areas of policies and activities in favour of a revival of economic growth are still either entirely – or to a large extent at least – matters for national parliaments and national governments to deal with. Labor market reforms, tax systems and education remain national affairs; whereas the strategy decided in Lisbon, at the start of the new millennium, had been discussed mainly at the EU level.
Member States certainly did realize that there was an urgent need to invest in research and innovation. Each single state obtained results of its own. But investments in common actions are slow to materialize; and I dare say that the results are far from matching the money invested, and that the volume of bureaucracy created largely exceeds the success of this action.
Mr.Zapatero’s call for new powers for the commission to control the follow-up of decisions taken survived for just four days. It was silenced by Germany and the UK.
And that was the end of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’!!!
Will the Lisbon Treaty help to avoid similar situations?
The progress made over time, up to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, is to be considered on the background of major changes which have occurred in relations between Member States in recent years.
The unification of so many different states, each one representing several ethnical and cultural diverse groups of populations, is a much more demanding task than the problems faced by the pioneers in the United States, three centuries ago. We must realize that the task to unite some 500 million people in our multi-ethnic and pluralistic European Union is an absolutely formidable challenge.
Today, far reaching differences continue to exist between old and new Member States within the EU. These have indeed represented the most difficult hurdles to be overcome during the recent debates on climate change!
The Copenhagen Conference itself had to cope with the gap between developing and the industrialized countries on a global basis. Similar problems had to be dealt with within the EU as well.
Our efforts to speak with one voice must not prevent us from taking into account different realities within individual member states, before we decide on whatever actions.
In Copenhagen, the EU wanted to confirm its leadership in climate change action; it failed and was marginalized. In fact, it failed to find the unanimity needed for truly ambitious action; and after having missed the targets for innovation and research set up a decade ago, industrial leadership was out of reach, for the production of clean cars, as well as in the field of green energy.
Paraphrasing the Green Peace banner – saying that « Politicians talk, Leaders act » – we are entitled to ask: where have they been, the leaders of the EU?
Will all this change in the future?
The Treaty of Lisbon enables the Council to vote with a qualified majority, a procedure which is now extended to include new policy areas as well.
Council meetings on legislative items will be public; this means that more time will be needed to prepare its meetings, as time is also needed for secret diplomacy. Heads of government will no longer be able to hide their individual political positions behind the secrecy of decision making at the European level.
The treaty improves the EU’s ability to act in several policy areas of major priority.
Freedom, security and justice, fighting terrorism and crime will become common policies.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights protects existing citizens rights and creates new ones. Some citizens, however, will be less equal than others: political leaders in Britain, in the Czech Republic and in Poland decided to opt out of the Charter!
Let us have a closer look at the rule of majority voting in the Council. In the past, some very important decisions have been blocked because of the need for unanimity. In this context, some leaders were calling for a Europe with two speeds, in the beginning mainly for matters concerning the single currency. Originally it had been Jacques Delors’ proposal in relation with the introduction of a common currency.
In his 1970 report on the monetary policy of the European Community, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner called for the centralization of macro-economic policies, which implied the fixing of parity rates for all participating currencies as well as the complete liberation of capital. movements,
This was the beginning of what later became the single European currency. The Euro was introduced as the common currency in 2002. Not all member states had chosen to join the system. Had one tried to introduce it by public referendum, it would never have come into existence.
This example tells us that two speeds may well lead to success, provided we are ready to consider that the common currency is a success. And yes, it is indeed a great achievement in European history.
The Schengen Agreement is another example of progress with two speeds. 24 countries are currently members of a cooperation organizing free movement of its citizens. It all started in 1980, when a unanimous decision to let citizens cross borders without passport controls was hopelessly out of reach. In 1985 an agreement was first signed in Schengen, a small town in Luxembourg, on the common border with France and Germany. This intergovernmental agreement started with France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
It has become part of the EU framework in 1999.
This is yet another success story which improves citizens’ mobility within the EU.
Both examples are proof that progress is possible, when it is the will of governments to act in a common European interest, even if they have to reach beyond the feelings of their own citizens.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”, Winston Churchill once said.
I have mentioned just two examples of good governance; there have been many more in the earlier stages of the European construction.
In the course of the last 50 years, many a challenging situation has occurred. The Union has managed to survive all the dangers of breaking apart.
Progress has been slow, but it has been steady as well.
And yet, we feel dissatisfied! We do feel a real need to proceed at a higher speed.
The jurisdiction of the court in Karlsruhe has awakened national parliaments and drawn their attention to the new role they will have to play in the future.
In spite of the very different institutional status of national parliaments, each of them now has two voices to object, within 8 weeks, to a legislative EU text, whenever it is not in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity.
Any initiative taken within European institutions, by the commission, by the council and by the parliament will have to be notified to national parliaments. The latter will now have the right to oppose them. This new procedure will be quite a challenge for those who are in charge of organizing time schedules!
The Lisbon Treaty gives a stronger voice to citizens with the » citizen’s initiative », a procedure through which a minimum of one million citizens from a number of member states have the possibility to call upon the Commission to bring forward new policy proposals. Some of the relevant rules have been written down in a green paper, but for the time being, it is not quite clear yet, how this system is going to work.
The awareness that we are taking part in historical achievements, which will definitely change the face of the continent, cannot emerge from a largely procedural or technical document like the Lisbon treaty.
In spite of the moral dimension of the Charter of Human Rights, despite the emphasis on the dignity of the single person, the recognition for every single nation, the rights of minorities, the freedom of speech among others – something important is still missing.
Therefore I want to mention that parallel to the shift from the failed Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty, an initiative has been launched here in Berlin, called « A soul for Europe », taking on board the president of the European Commission and other prominent members .
In his opening speech Mr. Barroso said « The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….Europe is not only about markets, it’s also about values and culture. If the economy is a necessity for our lives, culture is really what makes our lives worth living. »
This was said in 2006. It is a perfectly correct and true statement. Today, 4 years later, after 2008, the year of intercultural dialogue – and in the midst of an economic crisis – basic questions are asked about values like truthfulness, honesty, solidarity. And yet, debates on culture are not part of common EU objectives. Matters of culture are still left to be dealt with by member states, according to the principles of subsidiarity.
Could the Lisbon treaty be used as an instrument to launch Europe’s economy?
The initiatives projected within the Lisbon strategy could have opened new perspectives for the European economy. Let us imagine that investments into research and innovation had been implemented as expected, we might well have managed to develop “the clean car”; or renewable and efficient forms of energy. And In such a case Europe would have had an opportunity to become a leader in a number of important fields which require the use of new technologies.
Alas, the political will of member states was missing. I just referred to the conclusions of the European Parliament: the most important areas for an economic revival in Europe still are for the national states to decide upon, within their own national policies. It is therefore up to national decision makers to have their decisions fit into a European context.
How will the new procedures in the treaty be able to influence decision making in this direction?
Majority votes will certainly provide possibilities to speed up decision making procedures. Procedures to consult national parliaments are still not clear at this time.
The financial crisis has shown us that urgent decisions can very well be taken quickly.
During these last months we have noticed that somehow national interests have been put forward with less insistence, despite the fact that, for instance, France and Germany massively defended her national car industry.
Trade unions organized cross border demonstrations, when Opel works were to be closed in Germany and Belgium, while heads of states indulged in rather protectionist speeches.
Monsieur Sarkozy wants to be re-elected by French citizens just as Frau Merckel wishes to win elections in Germany.
Speaking in favour of Europe is by no means always accepted, nor understood, as an answer to peoples concerns in times of rising unemployment or economic uncertainty.
And yet – Europe is definitely not the problem, it is the solution.
As a consequence, we absolutely must increase our efforts in favour of a stronger Europe and strive to convince citizens to go along that road with us. Militants must be informed, convinced and committed to the common cause!
National parliaments together with the European Parliament will have to assume their roles as legislators. On the European level their decisions must be speeded up, and implementation in member states has to be accelerated
With the introduction of the right of initiatives the Lisbon treaty has created a possibility of direct intervention for citizens.
From now on citizens will have an opportunity to act as catalysers.
So now we have a way to mobilize citizens in favour of the European cause. Democratic powers must not be diluted by the creation of ever more institutions, committees or assemblies, with a right to interfere in the democratic process. On the contrary, already existing
organisms must be reminded of their responsibilities.
With millions of unemployed, Europe needs a social policy which will take into account the situation in member states. At this stage, Europe has not clearly defined the model of society it wants to create in the end. In coming decades political leaders will have to prove that social market economy is the model which can be accepted by a large majority.
We have finished building the Europe of governments and of parliaments, the Europe with a single market and a single currency. The time has now come to create a Europe for the citizens.
New technologies allow a more direct and more intensive dialogue with citizens. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: A Europe for the citizens. Allow me to quote Jean Monnet in a speech presented in Washington in 1952: “We do not unite states, we unite men”
I want to come to a conclusion, and therefore I turn back to culture. The first official act signed by all 27 member states has been the Unesco Convention on Cultural Diversity*. Enormous efforts lie ahead of us, should we
* Official title: CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
succeed in promoting this convention’s spirit of tolerance and understanding. This challenge is more demanding and more important than all the others. For the time being, culture and education still remain in the hands of national authorities. Cooperation among citizens of different cultures will be possible only when mutual understanding prevails. Many problems will arise which cannot be done away with by European directives or resolutions. Each and every citizen will be challenged.
Any human community has its roots in a tribe or a clan, with their myths and rituals, says Claude Riveline, professor at the École des Mines in Paris.
How does culture express itself in the ways employees of a company work and think in their daily routine? How can it be felt through the company’s organization, its machine
park, its production and management techniques? Is culture a factor which determines performance?
These questions refer to the ethics of economy and of governance.
In other words, economy cannot disregard culture – or cultures rather. If the EU is willing to improve its efficiency, it absolutely must study its people’s behaviours and the links to their cultural origins.
GNP, balances of payments, inflation and unemployment are not the only factors to be considered. The wellbeing and happiness of the Union’s citizens should also become a common concern and an objective of the Union itself.
Once more, and to finish, allow me to quote Jean Monnet: « If I had to start again, I would start with culture…. »
0000000000000000000000000
BERLIN
Decision making procedures after Lisbon
It was a great relief when the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was complete and when this was perceived as such by politicians and public opinion alike. A relief in the first place, because non ratification would have been a disastrous step back for the further implementation of common market principles; a relief as well at a time when euro-scepticism is growing, and the tiresome debate about institutional affairs is felt like a way to escape treating the core business of the European Union.
It is a fact that a broad majority of citizens is in favor of the common goals of a European Union; the ways to achieve these goals, however, remain a misty secret of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
We failed to provide the EU with a structure which would be simple enough to be easily understood. There are, however, no simple answers to complex questions, as both the history as well as the economic situation of every single member state, have to be taken into account.
European decision-making has become a succession of compromises; and finding the compromise to the compromise has become part of the secrecy of decision making processes within the European Union:
This means that a Commission proposal has to take into account national concerns, concerns of industries, sometimes strongly linked to member states interests, and citizens’ interests defended by the European Parliament. Numerous lobbyists in Brussels are continuously interfering in this decision making process.
Will the Lisbon treaty help to change all this?
That is the big question, and the answer is not easy at all, as a change of paradigm occurred between the first European treaty, signed in Rome in 1957, and the last one signed in Lisbon in December 2007.
The substantial progress achieved between those two dates, through the treaties of Amsterdam, of Maastricht and Nice, has not really been acknowledged by a larger average of Europe’s population. Eight years of a constitutional debate and often stormy disagreement have only modestly improved democracy and efficiency within the European Union. The rejection and/or renegotiation of treaties, which had already been signed by heads of states, leave question-marks: in whose name did they sign? On whose behalf did the Czech President refuse to sign, despite the fact that the ratification had been approved by the democratic institutions of his own country?
Never have questions about the efficiency of the institutions been more incisive, than after France’s and the Netherlands’ refusal to accept the so called Constitution, which had been signed in October 2004 by all heads of state, and ratified by 18 member states. In both countries, the debates during the weeks prior to the referendum have also been strongly focused on national political issues: in France it was the ‘polish plumber’, a popular expression to describe what the so called “Bolkenstein directive” had planned as a model for workers mobility within the EU . In both countries the debate was on Islam and the acceptance of Turkey as a full member of the EU. As governments of both these countries were fairly unpopular in those days, the final vote could also be seen as a sanction of national politics. In the Netherlands 80% of Parliament members were in favor of the constitution. So, what about their representation within a democracy in this situation? Voters’ participation in both referenda was much higher than in general European elections.
Public opinion, as expressed during elections, must be taken into account. Are democracies, who abandon the executive power to those who have been elected in free elections, still functioning the way they should when it comes to supranational decision-making? Is not the fact that the participation in European Parliament elections has been so very low, a strong hint that something is deeply wrong in the construction we made?
What do citizens really want, what do they know about the common problems of 27 members states, what are they told by their heads of state about decision-making in Brussels? Aren’t all bad things – which occur too often – considered to be decisions of the EU, and the good things, are they not presented as results of outstanding national performances?
It is a fact that patterns of thinking have remained national, while problems have become global. To act locally and to think globally, that is what we need to do. Will it be enough to explaining this to our citizens to generate a better understanding?
In the current economic crises the job to be done in Europe is to prevent outbreaks of national protectionism. Just imagine for a second that we would not have had a common currency in the euro zone, the financial crises would most certainly have caused much greater damage than it actually did.
This alone should have raised fresh enthusiasm for our common goals, or at least could have created a feeling for greater strength resulting from joint action, and for the urgent need to speed up the latter. Alas, the contrary is the case; protectionist tendencies have emerged in a number of member states. Citizens seem to feel more protected by their national potential, than by joint action in a union with common goals.
Two phenomena became apparent during the period of economic crises.
First: The official statements of the leaders of big member states, France, Germany and the UK. The joint press conferences of this threesome gave the impression that the three major economies had taken over exclusive leadership. They totally ignored what made the European Union so unique in the world, namely a union made of bigger, but also of smaller states, working together on an equal footing.
Second: the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe gave a serious warning when it said that the Bundestag had to be more closely involved in European legislation. As the Council of Ministers still is to be a co-legislator, does the German Government representative now have to check his decisions with the Bundestag before any Council meeting? What will time schedules for decision making have to look like in the future?
National parliaments will have a more active role to play, which raises practical questions about of how to organize the handling of initiatives taken by European Institutions.
In this respect, the basic role of the European Parliament really does not seem to be fully acknowledged by EU citizens as that of a genuine representative and democratic institution of the European construction. The Lisbon treaty has provided the EP with important new powers regarding EU legislation, EU budget and international agreements. The directly elected Parliament is now placed on an equal footing with the Council.
Greater involvement of national parliaments, as it is included in the Lisbon text, is not considered as a sufficient guarantee by the German court.
On the other hand, to say that Europe is not democratic, means to ignore all the efforts made by the last European Commission in favor of greater transparency in decision making: The debates in Parliament can be followed live on the internet, committee meetings are now open to the press, the hotline of commission services should provide answers to all the questions citizens might ask. And yet, in spite of all these possibilities of information, writing about Europe on the front page of a newspaper cuts down its circulation. Public interest in European affairs has decreased in parallel to the opening of the institutions to a wider public.
From the democratic bodies they have elected, citizens expect to be told, and to understand, what is going on; they want their elected representatives to explain what they are working on and what they are voting for. This has become a fairly impossible task for those who are closely involved in the decision making process. The wording of the European slang, filled with abbreviations, has become unintelligible to the average population. If we want this to change, the Lisbon treaty alone cannot provide the answers.
Contrary to the Constitution the Lisbon treaty does not mention the EU’s ambition to become a union of citizens, with a common citizenship, a flag, and an anthem. In the Lisbon treaty, the most frequently expressed concern of the EU, namely the « deepening before enlarging », has not been taken into account. As a consequence, the new agreement appears to be a technical improvement of the way the three main European institutions work together.
If we wish to improve the way decisions are made, we will have to start with an analysis of the recent past.
One example: The Spanish presidency started with Mr. Bean appearing on its internet homepage instead of Spain’s prime minister. And the links to the site collapsed…, thanks to the British comic..!
Apart from this joke on the net, Mr.Zapatero used his first address to the press to ask for additional powers for the Commission.
He was absolutely right to speak of a failure when he referred to the Lisbon agenda, or to the so called Lisbon strategy. Indeed, the plan to make Europe the world’s most competitive economy, approved in Lisbon in the year 2000, failed. It is a fact, that there had been no binding rules to determine the amounts to be invested in research and innovation in order to achieve the goals agreed upon.
But let us have a look at the way the decision had been taken: it was under the Portuguese Presidency, the first in the new millennium: a strong message was needed, and it was to be energetically announced by the minister in charge; and there was the wish to be present on the political agenda during the decade to come, with an outstanding statement on the need for the European economy to invest in research and innovation.
Could the Commission, together with the Presidency in charge, have done anything more than to establish a strategy, hoping that every single government would be responsible enough to make an effort to try and reach the common goal?
They could not!
The strategy was backed, it is true, by an action plan, and by the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ in order to help member states to launch the necessary reforms to reach the objective. Nonetheless, the strategy failed!
Learning from each other, best practices, joint policy initiatives and community actions should have been the outcome. In 2004 the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok was asked to present a report on the intermediate results of the Lisbon strategy. It was fairly disappointing.
The European Parliament created a special committee to discuss the role of the Lisbon agenda. A joint meeting organized with national parliaments focused on three key areas:
° sustainable energy,
° the internal market and innovation,
° human capital, job creation, education and social aspects.
Three joint meetings were organized in order to produce common statements, which were to be presented in plenary debates. One of these statements is of greater significance indeed:
A majority of important areas of policies and activities in favour of a revival of economic growth are still either entirely – or to a large extent at least – matters for national parliaments and national governments to deal with. Labor market reforms, tax systems and education remain national affairs; whereas the strategy decided in Lisbon, at the start of the new millennium, had been discussed mainly at the EU level.
Member States certainly did realize that there was an urgent need to invest in research and innovation. Each single state obtained results of its own. But investments in common actions are slow to materialize; and I dare say that the results are far from matching the money invested, and that the volume of bureaucracy created largely exceeds the success of this action.
Mr.Zapatero’s call for new powers for the commission to control the follow-up of decisions taken survived for just four days. It was silenced by Germany and the UK.
And that was the end of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’!!!
Will the Lisbon Treaty help to avoid similar situations?
The progress made over time, up to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, is to be considered on the background of major changes which have occurred in relations between Member States in recent years.
The unification of so many different states, each one representing several ethnical and cultural diverse groups of populations, is a much more demanding task than the problems faced by the pioneers in the United States, three centuries ago. We must realize that the task to unite some 500 million people in our multi-ethnic and pluralistic European Union is an absolutely formidable challenge.
Today, far reaching differences continue to exist between old and new Member States within the EU. These have indeed represented the most difficult hurdles to be overcome during the recent debates on climate change!
The Copenhagen Conference itself had to cope with the gap between developing and the industrialized countries on a global basis. Similar problems had to be dealt with within the EU as well.
Our efforts to speak with one voice must not prevent us from taking into account different realities within individual member states, before we decide on whatever actions.
In Copenhagen, the EU wanted to confirm its leadership in climate change action; it failed and was marginalized. In fact, it failed to find the unanimity needed for truly ambitious action; and after having missed the targets for innovation and research set up a decade ago, industrial leadership was out of reach, for the production of clean cars, as well as in the field of green energy.
Paraphrasing the Green Peace banner – saying that « Politicians talk, Leaders act » – we are entitled to ask: where have they been, the leaders of the EU?
Will all this change in the future?
The Treaty of Lisbon enables the Council to vote with a qualified majority, a procedure which is now extended to include new policy areas as well.
Council meetings on legislative items will be public; this means that more time will be needed to prepare its meetings, as time is also needed for secret diplomacy. Heads of government will no longer be able to hide their individual political positions behind the secrecy of decision making at the European level.
The treaty improves the EU’s ability to act in several policy areas of major priority.
Freedom, security and justice, fighting terrorism and crime will become common policies.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights protects existing citizens rights and creates new ones. Some citizens, however, will be less equal than others: political leaders in Britain, in the Czech Republic and in Poland decided to opt out of the Charter!
Let us have a closer look at the rule of majority voting in the Council. In the past, some very important decisions have been blocked because of the need for unanimity. In this context, some leaders were calling for a Europe with two speeds, in the beginning mainly for matters concerning the single currency. Originally it had been Jacques Delors’ proposal in relation with the introduction of a common currency.
In his 1970 report on the monetary policy of the European Community, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner called for the centralization of macro-economic policies, which implied the fixing of parity rates for all participating currencies as well as the complete liberation of capital. movements,
This was the beginning of what later became the single European currency. The Euro was introduced as the common currency in 2002. Not all member states had chosen to join the system. Had one tried to introduce it by public referendum, it would never have come into existence.
This example tells us that two speeds may well lead to success, provided we are ready to consider that the common currency is a success. And yes, it is indeed a great achievement in European history.
The Schengen Agreement is another example of progress with two speeds. 24 countries are currently members of a cooperation organizing free movement of its citizens. It all started in 1980, when a unanimous decision to let citizens cross borders without passport controls was hopelessly out of reach. In 1985 an agreement was first signed in Schengen, a small town in Luxembourg, on the common border with France and Germany. This intergovernmental agreement started with France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
It has become part of the EU framework in 1999.
This is yet another success story which improves citizens’ mobility within the EU.
Both examples are proof that progress is possible, when it is the will of governments to act in a common European interest, even if they have to reach beyond the feelings of their own citizens.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”, Winston Churchill once said.
I have mentioned just two examples of good governance; there have been many more in the earlier stages of the European construction.
In the course of the last 50 years, many a challenging situation has occurred. The Union has managed to survive all the dangers of breaking apart.
Progress has been slow, but it has been steady as well.
And yet, we feel dissatisfied! We do feel a real need to proceed at a higher speed.
The jurisdiction of the court in Karlsruhe has awakened national parliaments and drawn their attention to the new role they will have to play in the future.
In spite of the very different institutional status of national parliaments, each of them now has two voices to object, within 8 weeks, to a legislative EU text, whenever it is not in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity.
Any initiative taken within European institutions, by the commission, by the council and by the parliament will have to be notified to national parliaments. The latter will now have the right to oppose them. This new procedure will be quite a challenge for those who are in charge of organizing time schedules!
The Lisbon Treaty gives a stronger voice to citizens with the » citizen’s initiative », a procedure through which a minimum of one million citizens from a number of member states have the possibility to call upon the Commission to bring forward new policy proposals. Some of the relevant rules have been written down in a green paper, but for the time being, it is not quite clear yet, how this system is going to work.
The awareness that we are taking part in historical achievements, which will definitely change the face of the continent, cannot emerge from a largely procedural or technical document like the Lisbon treaty.
In spite of the moral dimension of the Charter of Human Rights, despite the emphasis on the dignity of the single person, the recognition for every single nation, the rights of minorities, the freedom of speech among others – something important is still missing.
Therefore I want to mention that parallel to the shift from the failed Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty, an initiative has been launched here in Berlin, called « A soul for Europe », taking on board the president of the European Commission and other prominent members .
In his opening speech Mr. Barroso said « The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….Europe is not only about markets, it’s also about values and culture. If the economy is a necessity for our lives, culture is really what makes our lives worth living. »
This was said in 2006. It is a perfectly correct and true statement. Today, 4 years later, after 2008, the year of intercultural dialogue – and in the midst of an economic crisis – basic questions are asked about values like truthfulness, honesty, solidarity. And yet, debates on culture are not part of common EU objectives. Matters of culture are still left to be dealt with by member states, according to the principles of subsidiarity.
Could the Lisbon treaty be used as an instrument to launch Europe’s economy?
The initiatives projected within the Lisbon strategy could have opened new perspectives for the European economy. Let us imagine that investments into research and innovation had been implemented as expected, we might well have managed to develop “the clean car”; or renewable and efficient forms of energy. And In such a case Europe would have had an opportunity to become a leader in a number of important fields which require the use of new technologies.
Alas, the political will of member states was missing. I just referred to the conclusions of the European Parliament: the most important areas for an economic revival in Europe still are for the national states to decide upon, within their own national policies. It is therefore up to national decision makers to have their decisions fit into a European context.
How will the new procedures in the treaty be able to influence decision making in this direction?
Majority votes will certainly provide possibilities to speed up decision making procedures. Procedures to consult national parliaments are still not clear at this time.
The financial crisis has shown us that urgent decisions can very well be taken quickly.
During these last months we have noticed that somehow national interests have been put forward with less insistence, despite the fact that, for instance, France and Germany massively defended her national car industry.
Trade unions organized cross border demonstrations, when Opel works were to be closed in Germany and Belgium, while heads of states indulged in rather protectionist speeches.
Monsieur Sarkozy wants to be re-elected by French citizens just as Frau Merckel wishes to win elections in Germany.
Speaking in favour of Europe is by no means always accepted, nor understood, as an answer to peoples concerns in times of rising unemployment or economic uncertainty.
And yet – Europe is definitely not the problem, it is the solution.
As a consequence, we absolutely must increase our efforts in favour of a stronger Europe and strive to convince citizens to go along that road with us. Militants must be informed, convinced and committed to the common cause!
National parliaments together with the European Parliament will have to assume their roles as legislators. On the European level their decisions must be speeded up, and implementation in member states has to be accelerated
With the introduction of the right of initiatives the Lisbon treaty has created a possibility of direct intervention for citizens.
From now on citizens will have an opportunity to act as catalysers.
So now we have a way to mobilize citizens in favour of the European cause. Democratic powers must not be diluted by the creation of ever more institutions, committees or assemblies, with a right to interfere in the democratic process. On the contrary, already existing
organisms must be reminded of their responsibilities.
With millions of unemployed, Europe needs a social policy which will take into account the situation in member states. At this stage, Europe has not clearly defined the model of society it wants to create in the end. In coming decades political leaders will have to prove that social market economy is the model which can be accepted by a large majority.
We have finished building the Europe of governments and of parliaments, the Europe with a single market and a single currency. The time has now come to create a Europe for the citizens.
New technologies allow a more direct and more intensive dialogue with citizens. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: A Europe for the citizens. Allow me to quote Jean Monnet in a speech presented in Washington in 1952: “We do not unite states, we unite men”
I want to come to a conclusion, and therefore I turn back to culture. The first official act signed by all 27 member states has been the Unesco Convention on Cultural Diversity*. Enormous efforts lie ahead of us, should we
* Official title: CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
succeed in promoting this convention’s spirit of tolerance and understanding. This challenge is more demanding and more important than all the others. For the time being, culture and education still remain in the hands of national authorities. Cooperation among citizens of different cultures will be possible only when mutual understanding prevails. Many problems will arise which cannot be done away with by European directives or resolutions. Each and every citizen will be challenged.
Any human community has its roots in a tribe or a clan, with their myths and rituals, says Claude Riveline, professor at the École des Mines in Paris.
How does culture express itself in the ways employees of a company work and think in their daily routine? How can it be felt through the company’s organization, its machine
park, its production and management techniques? Is culture a factor which determines performance?
These questions refer to the ethics of economy and of governance.
In other words, economy cannot disregard culture – or cultures rather. If the EU is willing to improve its efficiency, it absolutely must study its people’s behaviours and the links to their cultural origins.
GNP, balances of payments, inflation and unemployment are not the only factors to be considered. The wellbeing and happiness of the Union’s citizens should also become a common concern and an objective of the Union itself.
Once more, and to finish, allow me to quote Jean Monnet: « If I had to start again, I would start with culture…. »
0000000000000000000000000
BERLIN
Decision making procedures after Lisbon
It was a great relief when the ratification of the Lisbon treaty was complete and when this was perceived as such by politicians and public opinion alike. A relief in the first place, because non ratification would have been a disastrous step back for the further implementation of common market principles; a relief as well at a time when euro-scepticism is growing, and the tiresome debate about institutional affairs is felt like a way to escape treating the core business of the European Union.
It is a fact that a broad majority of citizens is in favor of the common goals of a European Union; the ways to achieve these goals, however, remain a misty secret of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy.
We failed to provide the EU with a structure which would be simple enough to be easily understood. There are, however, no simple answers to complex questions, as both the history as well as the economic situation of every single member state, have to be taken into account.
European decision-making has become a succession of compromises; and finding the compromise to the compromise has become part of the secrecy of decision making processes within the European Union:
This means that a Commission proposal has to take into account national concerns, concerns of industries, sometimes strongly linked to member states interests, and citizens’ interests defended by the European Parliament. Numerous lobbyists in Brussels are continuously interfering in this decision making process.
Will the Lisbon treaty help to change all this?
That is the big question, and the answer is not easy at all, as a change of paradigm occurred between the first European treaty, signed in Rome in 1957, and the last one signed in Lisbon in December 2007.
The substantial progress achieved between those two dates, through the treaties of Amsterdam, of Maastricht and Nice, has not really been acknowledged by a larger average of Europe’s population. Eight years of a constitutional debate and often stormy disagreement have only modestly improved democracy and efficiency within the European Union. The rejection and/or renegotiation of treaties, which had already been signed by heads of states, leave question-marks: in whose name did they sign? On whose behalf did the Czech President refuse to sign, despite the fact that the ratification had been approved by the democratic institutions of his own country?
Never have questions about the efficiency of the institutions been more incisive, than after France’s and the Netherlands’ refusal to accept the so called Constitution, which had been signed in October 2004 by all heads of state, and ratified by 18 member states. In both countries, the debates during the weeks prior to the referendum have also been strongly focused on national political issues: in France it was the ‘polish plumber’, a popular expression to describe what the so called “Bolkenstein directive” had planned as a model for workers mobility within the EU . In both countries the debate was on Islam and the acceptance of Turkey as a full member of the EU. As governments of both these countries were fairly unpopular in those days, the final vote could also be seen as a sanction of national politics. In the Netherlands 80% of Parliament members were in favor of the constitution. So, what about their representation within a democracy in this situation? Voters’ participation in both referenda was much higher than in general European elections.
Public opinion, as expressed during elections, must be taken into account. Are democracies, who abandon the executive power to those who have been elected in free elections, still functioning the way they should when it comes to supranational decision-making? Is not the fact that the participation in European Parliament elections has been so very low, a strong hint that something is deeply wrong in the construction we made?
What do citizens really want, what do they know about the common problems of 27 members states, what are they told by their heads of state about decision-making in Brussels? Aren’t all bad things – which occur too often – considered to be decisions of the EU, and the good things, are they not presented as results of outstanding national performances?
It is a fact that patterns of thinking have remained national, while problems have become global. To act locally and to think globally, that is what we need to do. Will it be enough to explaining this to our citizens to generate a better understanding?
In the current economic crises the job to be done in Europe is to prevent outbreaks of national protectionism. Just imagine for a second that we would not have had a common currency in the euro zone, the financial crises would most certainly have caused much greater damage than it actually did.
This alone should have raised fresh enthusiasm for our common goals, or at least could have created a feeling for greater strength resulting from joint action, and for the urgent need to speed up the latter. Alas, the contrary is the case; protectionist tendencies have emerged in a number of member states. Citizens seem to feel more protected by their national potential, than by joint action in a union with common goals.
Two phenomena became apparent during the period of economic crises.
First: The official statements of the leaders of big member states, France, Germany and the UK. The joint press conferences of this threesome gave the impression that the three major economies had taken over exclusive leadership. They totally ignored what made the European Union so unique in the world, namely a union made of bigger, but also of smaller states, working together on an equal footing.
Second: the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe gave a serious warning when it said that the Bundestag had to be more closely involved in European legislation. As the Council of Ministers still is to be a co-legislator, does the German Government representative now have to check his decisions with the Bundestag before any Council meeting? What will time schedules for decision making have to look like in the future?
National parliaments will have a more active role to play, which raises practical questions about of how to organize the handling of initiatives taken by European Institutions.
In this respect, the basic role of the European Parliament really does not seem to be fully acknowledged by EU citizens as that of a genuine representative and democratic institution of the European construction. The Lisbon treaty has provided the EP with important new powers regarding EU legislation, EU budget and international agreements. The directly elected Parliament is now placed on an equal footing with the Council.
Greater involvement of national parliaments, as it is included in the Lisbon text, is not considered as a sufficient guarantee by the German court.
On the other hand, to say that Europe is not democratic, means to ignore all the efforts made by the last European Commission in favor of greater transparency in decision making: The debates in Parliament can be followed live on the internet, committee meetings are now open to the press, the hotline of commission services should provide answers to all the questions citizens might ask. And yet, in spite of all these possibilities of information, writing about Europe on the front page of a newspaper cuts down its circulation. Public interest in European affairs has decreased in parallel to the opening of the institutions to a wider public.
From the democratic bodies they have elected, citizens expect to be told, and to understand, what is going on; they want their elected representatives to explain what they are working on and what they are voting for. This has become a fairly impossible task for those who are closely involved in the decision making process. The wording of the European slang, filled with abbreviations, has become unintelligible to the average population. If we want this to change, the Lisbon treaty alone cannot provide the answers.
Contrary to the Constitution the Lisbon treaty does not mention the EU’s ambition to become a union of citizens, with a common citizenship, a flag, and an anthem. In the Lisbon treaty, the most frequently expressed concern of the EU, namely the « deepening before enlarging », has not been taken into account. As a consequence, the new agreement appears to be a technical improvement of the way the three main European institutions work together.
If we wish to improve the way decisions are made, we will have to start with an analysis of the recent past.
One example: The Spanish presidency started with Mr. Bean appearing on its internet homepage instead of Spain’s prime minister. And the links to the site collapsed…, thanks to the British comic..!
Apart from this joke on the net, Mr.Zapatero used his first address to the press to ask for additional powers for the Commission.
He was absolutely right to speak of a failure when he referred to the Lisbon agenda, or to the so called Lisbon strategy. Indeed, the plan to make Europe the world’s most competitive economy, approved in Lisbon in the year 2000, failed. It is a fact, that there had been no binding rules to determine the amounts to be invested in research and innovation in order to achieve the goals agreed upon.
But let us have a look at the way the decision had been taken: it was under the Portuguese Presidency, the first in the new millennium: a strong message was needed, and it was to be energetically announced by the minister in charge; and there was the wish to be present on the political agenda during the decade to come, with an outstanding statement on the need for the European economy to invest in research and innovation.
Could the Commission, together with the Presidency in charge, have done anything more than to establish a strategy, hoping that every single government would be responsible enough to make an effort to try and reach the common goal?
They could not!
The strategy was backed, it is true, by an action plan, and by the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ in order to help member states to launch the necessary reforms to reach the objective. Nonetheless, the strategy failed!
Learning from each other, best practices, joint policy initiatives and community actions should have been the outcome. In 2004 the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok was asked to present a report on the intermediate results of the Lisbon strategy. It was fairly disappointing.
The European Parliament created a special committee to discuss the role of the Lisbon agenda. A joint meeting organized with national parliaments focused on three key areas:
° sustainable energy,
° the internal market and innovation,
° human capital, job creation, education and social aspects.
Three joint meetings were organized in order to produce common statements, which were to be presented in plenary debates. One of these statements is of greater significance indeed:
A majority of important areas of policies and activities in favour of a revival of economic growth are still either entirely – or to a large extent at least – matters for national parliaments and national governments to deal with. Labor market reforms, tax systems and education remain national affairs; whereas the strategy decided in Lisbon, at the start of the new millennium, had been discussed mainly at the EU level.
Member States certainly did realize that there was an urgent need to invest in research and innovation. Each single state obtained results of its own. But investments in common actions are slow to materialize; and I dare say that the results are far from matching the money invested, and that the volume of bureaucracy created largely exceeds the success of this action.
Mr.Zapatero’s call for new powers for the commission to control the follow-up of decisions taken survived for just four days. It was silenced by Germany and the UK.
And that was the end of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’!!!
Will the Lisbon Treaty help to avoid similar situations?
The progress made over time, up to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, is to be considered on the background of major changes which have occurred in relations between Member States in recent years.
The unification of so many different states, each one representing several ethnical and cultural diverse groups of populations, is a much more demanding task than the problems faced by the pioneers in the United States, three centuries ago. We must realize that the task to unite some 500 million people in our multi-ethnic and pluralistic European Union is an absolutely formidable challenge.
Today, far reaching differences continue to exist between old and new Member States within the EU. These have indeed represented the most difficult hurdles to be overcome during the recent debates on climate change!
The Copenhagen Conference itself had to cope with the gap between developing and the industrialized countries on a global basis. Similar problems had to be dealt with within the EU as well.
Our efforts to speak with one voice must not prevent us from taking into account different realities within individual member states, before we decide on whatever actions.
In Copenhagen, the EU wanted to confirm its leadership in climate change action; it failed and was marginalized. In fact, it failed to find the unanimity needed for truly ambitious action; and after having missed the targets for innovation and research set up a decade ago, industrial leadership was out of reach, for the production of clean cars, as well as in the field of green energy.
Paraphrasing the Green Peace banner – saying that « Politicians talk, Leaders act » – we are entitled to ask: where have they been, the leaders of the EU?
Will all this change in the future?
The Treaty of Lisbon enables the Council to vote with a qualified majority, a procedure which is now extended to include new policy areas as well.
Council meetings on legislative items will be public; this means that more time will be needed to prepare its meetings, as time is also needed for secret diplomacy. Heads of government will no longer be able to hide their individual political positions behind the secrecy of decision making at the European level.
The treaty improves the EU’s ability to act in several policy areas of major priority.
Freedom, security and justice, fighting terrorism and crime will become common policies.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights protects existing citizens rights and creates new ones. Some citizens, however, will be less equal than others: political leaders in Britain, in the Czech Republic and in Poland decided to opt out of the Charter!
Let us have a closer look at the rule of majority voting in the Council. In the past, some very important decisions have been blocked because of the need for unanimity. In this context, some leaders were calling for a Europe with two speeds, in the beginning mainly for matters concerning the single currency. Originally it had been Jacques Delors’ proposal in relation with the introduction of a common currency.
In his 1970 report on the monetary policy of the European Community, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Pierre Werner called for the centralization of macro-economic policies, which implied the fixing of parity rates for all participating currencies as well as the complete liberation of capital. movements,
This was the beginning of what later became the single European currency. The Euro was introduced as the common currency in 2002. Not all member states had chosen to join the system. Had one tried to introduce it by public referendum, it would never have come into existence.
This example tells us that two speeds may well lead to success, provided we are ready to consider that the common currency is a success. And yes, it is indeed a great achievement in European history.
The Schengen Agreement is another example of progress with two speeds. 24 countries are currently members of a cooperation organizing free movement of its citizens. It all started in 1980, when a unanimous decision to let citizens cross borders without passport controls was hopelessly out of reach. In 1985 an agreement was first signed in Schengen, a small town in Luxembourg, on the common border with France and Germany. This intergovernmental agreement started with France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
It has become part of the EU framework in 1999.
This is yet another success story which improves citizens’ mobility within the EU.
Both examples are proof that progress is possible, when it is the will of governments to act in a common European interest, even if they have to reach beyond the feelings of their own citizens.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried”, Winston Churchill once said.
I have mentioned just two examples of good governance; there have been many more in the earlier stages of the European construction.
In the course of the last 50 years, many a challenging situation has occurred. The Union has managed to survive all the dangers of breaking apart.
Progress has been slow, but it has been steady as well.
And yet, we feel dissatisfied! We do feel a real need to proceed at a higher speed.
The jurisdiction of the court in Karlsruhe has awakened national parliaments and drawn their attention to the new role they will have to play in the future.
In spite of the very different institutional status of national parliaments, each of them now has two voices to object, within 8 weeks, to a legislative EU text, whenever it is not in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity.
Any initiative taken within European institutions, by the commission, by the council and by the parliament will have to be notified to national parliaments. The latter will now have the right to oppose them. This new procedure will be quite a challenge for those who are in charge of organizing time schedules!
The Lisbon Treaty gives a stronger voice to citizens with the » citizen’s initiative », a procedure through which a minimum of one million citizens from a number of member states have the possibility to call upon the Commission to bring forward new policy proposals. Some of the relevant rules have been written down in a green paper, but for the time being, it is not quite clear yet, how this system is going to work.
The awareness that we are taking part in historical achievements, which will definitely change the face of the continent, cannot emerge from a largely procedural or technical document like the Lisbon treaty.
In spite of the moral dimension of the Charter of Human Rights, despite the emphasis on the dignity of the single person, the recognition for every single nation, the rights of minorities, the freedom of speech among others – something important is still missing.
Therefore I want to mention that parallel to the shift from the failed Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty, an initiative has been launched here in Berlin, called « A soul for Europe », taking on board the president of the European Commission and other prominent members .
In his opening speech Mr. Barroso said « The EU has reached a stage of its history where its cultural dimension can no longer be ignored….Europe is not only about markets, it’s also about values and culture. If the economy is a necessity for our lives, culture is really what makes our lives worth living. »
This was said in 2006. It is a perfectly correct and true statement. Today, 4 years later, after 2008, the year of intercultural dialogue – and in the midst of an economic crisis – basic questions are asked about values like truthfulness, honesty, solidarity. And yet, debates on culture are not part of common EU objectives. Matters of culture are still left to be dealt with by member states, according to the principles of subsidiarity.
Could the Lisbon treaty be used as an instrument to launch Europe’s economy?
The initiatives projected within the Lisbon strategy could have opened new perspectives for the European economy. Let us imagine that investments into research and innovation had been implemented as expected, we might well have managed to develop “the clean car”; or renewable and efficient forms of energy. And In such a case Europe would have had an opportunity to become a leader in a number of important fields which require the use of new technologies.
Alas, the political will of member states was missing. I just referred to the conclusions of the European Parliament: the most important areas for an economic revival in Europe still are for the national states to decide upon, within their own national policies. It is therefore up to national decision makers to have their decisions fit into a European context.
How will the new procedures in the treaty be able to influence decision making in this direction?
Majority votes will certainly provide possibilities to speed up decision making procedures. Procedures to consult national parliaments are still not clear at this time.
The financial crisis has shown us that urgent decisions can very well be taken quickly.
During these last months we have noticed that somehow national interests have been put forward with less insistence, despite the fact that, for instance, France and Germany massively defended her national car industry.
Trade unions organized cross border demonstrations, when Opel works were to be closed in Germany and Belgium, while heads of states indulged in rather protectionist speeches.
Monsieur Sarkozy wants to be re-elected by French citizens just as Frau Merckel wishes to win elections in Germany.
Speaking in favour of Europe is by no means always accepted, nor understood, as an answer to peoples concerns in times of rising unemployment or economic uncertainty.
And yet – Europe is definitely not the problem, it is the solution.
As a consequence, we absolutely must increase our efforts in favour of a stronger Europe and strive to convince citizens to go along that road with us. Militants must be informed, convinced and committed to the common cause!
National parliaments together with the European Parliament will have to assume their roles as legislators. On the European level their decisions must be speeded up, and implementation in member states has to be accelerated
With the introduction of the right of initiatives the Lisbon treaty has created a possibility of direct intervention for citizens.
From now on citizens will have an opportunity to act as catalysers.
So now we have a way to mobilize citizens in favour of the European cause. Democratic powers must not be diluted by the creation of ever more institutions, committees or assemblies, with a right to interfere in the democratic process. On the contrary, already existing
organisms must be reminded of their responsibilities.
With millions of unemployed, Europe needs a social policy which will take into account the situation in member states. At this stage, Europe has not clearly defined the model of society it wants to create in the end. In coming decades political leaders will have to prove that social market economy is the model which can be accepted by a large majority.
We have finished building the Europe of governments and of parliaments, the Europe with a single market and a single currency. The time has now come to create a Europe for the citizens.
New technologies allow a more direct and more intensive dialogue with citizens. The founding fathers wanted exactly that: A Europe for the citizens. Allow me to quote Jean Monnet in a speech presented in Washington in 1952: “We do not unite states, we unite men”
I want to come to a conclusion, and therefore I turn back to culture. The first official act signed by all 27 member states has been the Unesco Convention on Cultural Diversity*. Enormous efforts lie ahead of us, should we
* Official title: CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
succeed in promoting this convention’s spirit of tolerance and understanding. This challenge is more demanding and more important than all the others. For the time being, culture and education still remain in the hands of national authorities. Cooperation among citizens of different cultures will be possible only when mutual understanding prevails. Many problems will arise which cannot be done away with by European directives or resolutions. Each and every citizen will be challenged.
Any human community has its roots in a tribe or a clan, with their myths and rituals, says Claude Riveline, professor at the École des Mines in Paris.
How does culture express itself in the ways employees of a company work and think in their daily routine? How can it be felt through the company’s organization, its machine
park, its production and management techniques? Is culture a factor which determines performance?
These questions refer to the ethics of economy and of governance.
In other words, economy cannot disregard culture – or cultures rather. If the EU is willing to improve its efficiency, it absolutely must study its people’s behaviours and the links to their cultural origins.
GNP, balances of payments, inflation and unemployment are not the only factors to be considered. The wellbeing and happiness of the Union’s citizens should also become a common concern and an objective of the Union itself.
Once more, and to finish, allow me to quote Jean Monnet: « If I had to start again, I would start with culture…. »
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