Can it be done? If not, Giscard tells NEWSWEEK, he doesn’t see much future for the European Union. “Right now,” he says, “the system has gone…” He stops himself. Is he about to say “gone bad”? Or maybe has reached the point of being “broken”? “Yes,” he replies. “But that’s too much. Let’s just say… it functions with great difficulty.”
That bit of diplomatic legerdemain is said with a chuckle, of course. But if Europe is not exactly broken, Giscard knows full well that it soon could be. For the past five months, ever since the convention began deliberations in Brussels, its 105 delegates from the European Union’s 15 members and 13 candidate states have listened to a litany of hopes and frustrations, confusion and incomprehension. And with as many as 12 of those candidate states set to join by the end of 2004, Giscard feels more than a little urgency about the convention’s work. He’s called it “the last chance” for a united Europe, and he elaborates bluntly: “Look, a system that works badly with 15 can’t work at all with 27.” Responsibility and channels of authority are confused at every turn. The EU’s decisions are often “incomprehensible to the public.” So for all his politesse and delicate talk of “texts,” he’s likely to propose an almost complete re-think of how the Union operates.
As Giscard strolls along the bucolic Loire, Eurocrats suspect, he’ll be hatching a master plan that he intends to ram through the convention over the winter. And even as he demurs, the ever-confident and oh-so-French patrician lays out some fundamentals of his (and what may well become Europe’s) new vision for the coming decades.
For 50 years the driving force in Europe’s grand experiment was the team of France and Germany, working as partners. Together, they pulled the rest of the Union behind them, calling the shots in tandem even though the unanimous approval of other members was supposedly required for any important decision. But those days are fading, if not gone. “The French-German engine is no longer the driving force,” Giscard says matter-of-factly. As if on cue, President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroder met last week, eloquently demonstrating how far apart the old allies have grown by being unable even to discuss (let alone agree upon) how to tackle the prickly problem of European budgets and the divisive “common” agricultural policy. Yet when Paris and Berlin are not pulling in the same direction, the EU ends up with little direction at all. Unless Europe can create a new engine to propel its evolution, says Giscard, “it will be impossible for the Union to move forward.”
It’s not clear how that problem will be resolved. So far, Giscard’s biggest challenge has been to keep the conventioneers from toppling into a fundamental divide. Right now, there are several camps, each with different views about how power should be shared and decisions made. One comprises existing members, eager to preserve their prerogatives and turf. Another is made up of prospective new members, who want not only their say but also a fair share of the Union’s resources. There’s also another division–between big nations with large populations, and small ones. Under current rules, each member has one vote on EU affairs. But is that fair, or even workable? Should one small state have veto power over all others? “With 25 or 27 states, decisions would be impossible to take,” says Giscard. The only solution is a system where decisions are made by majority vote, possibly weighted according to nations’ relative size and power. “And that,” he says, “is what we are going to propose.”
This relates to a second difficult issue: how to balance the interests and prerogatives of individual states against those of the Union? This goes beyond the hoary and still-unresolved debate over a “federal” Europe, as envisioned by Germany, versus the club of sovereign nation-states championed, say, by Britain. As Giscard sees it, there’s a more basic question: what does the European Union do? “You can’t have a majority imposing solutions that a minority refuses to accept,” he says. The only course, therefore, is to confine the EU to tasks all members agree to share.
He enumerates a few. “First is to make the European single market work,” progressively eliminating trade barriers and other impediments to commerce–a serious challenge, given the impending entry of a half dozen post-communist economies into the Union. Then there’s the euro, requiring new and perhaps more interventionist European monetary and fiscal policies. Already, Portugal and Germany are testing the limits of the so-called stability pact, which restricts the size of the budget deficit that any member government can run. It’s also increasingly apparent that some areas will remain off-limits to the EU, despite past rhetoric. One is social policy. Giscard is visibly relieved that, at the convention, the questions of common education, health care, labor and pension policies have hardly been raised.
Amid the Loire’s grand chateaux, the Frenchman will likely contemplate a third major conundrum: Europe’s place in the world, and the matter of a common foreign policy. The president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, calls for a European foreign minister, not to mention a commonly elected president. He’s backed by Germany, among others, and strenuously opposed by Britain, also among others. Giscard says he has reached no conclusions. But being French, he’s no doubt keenly conscious of his country’s traditional independence in foreign affairs. Regional security policy is clearer, he suggests. Europeans want free movement but are deeply concerned about security, crime and immigration. These problems, he says flatly, “cannot be dealt with by the individual governments.”
Contrary to the suspicions in Brussels, Giscard cheerfully admits he has few hard-and-fast answers to the many questions Europe is asking itself. But by the same token, he sees no choice but to find them. If his conventioneers fail to chart a path to the future, he says, “I don’t see who will succeed after us.” In the United States there’s a familiar saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In Europe, Giscard insists, if the system isn’t fixed, it will almost certainly be broken.
