Forging a deeper European unity?
EU leaders meet in Brussels amid battles over a bid to create a European government with a permanent president and its own diplomatic corps.
from the June 22, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
New French president Nicolas Sarkozy seems confident he can help Germany restart the European project. The German-led plan is not being freighted with the word "constitution," but is called a "treaty" about "institutional reforms." It is designed to be ratified by national parliaments rather than by popular referendums – thought to be dicier as a sell.
Chancellor Merkel wants a six-month timetable, a "treaty" whose ultimate goal is to set reforms in place, so that the 2009 European elections would take place under new rules. Europeans would elect a federal parliament at that time – one with more clout.
Yet despite Merkel's push, it is not clear whether Europe's leaders can find agreement at the meeting, expected to end Saturday. The Germans had been under the impression that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would pave the way in Britain; but there has been a striking lack of preparation among ordinary Britons for the kind of sweeping changes that would be presented to them. Britain is not ready to give immigration and foreign policy, for example, over to the EU.
An EU with 27 members working under rules designed for half that number is akin, as one Paris commentator put it, to a computer "using an old 20th-century operating system for 21st-century demand – it is too slow."
Balking at strong federal center
On a continent with strong national identities, difficulties remain in shifting power toward a federal center. That shift is being engineered more by elites unwilling to put the question to a public vote. Even former French president Valéry Giscard D'Éstaing, the plan's architect, says the French are adopting "without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly."
The Poles, backed by the Czechs, want a different formula for internal EU voting, one that favors smaller states. Relations between Germany and Poland carry emotional historical baggage, experts say. And yesterday, Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski linked progress on the talks to reparations from Germany for the Nazi invasion in World War II.
Poland may be not want to be isolated and find itself blamed for a failure. But Warsaw is taking a hard position, as is London. "No one can count on our acceptance. And the extreme solution will be the veto," Prime Minister Kaczynski warned Tuesday.
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