EU Still Searching for a Blueprint

In this sunny Mediterranean city of yacht basins, olive oil manufacturers and high-tech firms, leaders of the European Union, the continent’s closest thing to a confederation, argued all day Saturday over how to lay the groundwork for the Europe of the 21st century.

The latest proposals from France, the summit host, riled big and small nations alike, as well as at least one country not yet in the EU. The French retooled their draft, and the meeting, which was supposed to have ended at noontime, was set to reconvene today.

“We are in the process of advancing. Laboriously, but we are advancing,” French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine told reporters.

The EU’s roots go back to a six-nation group created to pool coal and steel resources after the devastation and trauma caused on the continent by World War II. Now something more than a free-trade zone but less than a single state, the union is poised to grow in the coming years to stretch from Belfast in Northern Ireland to Bucharest in Romania, and perhaps beyond.

For Europeans, it’s historic stuff, potentially the beginning of the end to a gulf in living standards and lifestyles bequeathed by the Cold War, but plenty of prosaic matters must be resolved first. In Nice, heads of state and government of the 15 EU countries have been working since Thursday to write a new treaty to decree how power should be parceled out inside the organization before it expands.

The reason is that the trade bloc’s internal mechanics were designed in the late 1950s, when it had only a small number of relatively homogeneous members--France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Now the EU not only consists of 15 countries, but it is also preparing to add a dozen more--akin to the United States doubling in size in a decade.

In Nice, the EU leaders said they hope to admit the first nations from beyond the former Iron Curtain in time for their citizens to take part in June 2004 elections to the European Parliament. That deadline is not a formal “engagement,” Pierre Moscovici, France’s minister for European affairs, was careful to point out. But many summit participants clearly were feeling the pressure of time.

Since the 1950s, the process of European integration has been a hesitation waltz of nations sacrificing some sovereignty but digging in when they believe that their vital interests are at stake. And so it has gone in Nice.

“The problem is that everyone has made promises to their citizens at home, and they are now prisoners of these promises, so finding a compromise will be difficult,” Romano Prodi, president of the EU’s administrative arm, the European Commission, had predicted.

Until almost midnight Friday, French President Jacques Chirac, the summit’s chairman, met one-on-one with the other leaders to search for a compromise on the reforms needed to streamline EU decision-making. After toiling through the night, the French on Saturday morning presented a revised draft of the proposed Treaty of Nice, but it was quickly rejected by many nations, including Germany, Britain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Denmark and Finland.

“This document takes us very far away from agreement,” a member of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s delegation complained. The Germans want their clout in EU voting boosted to reflect the fact that their country has at least 22 million more people than any other EU member--a demand the French reject as endangering longtime French-German parity and cooperation.

The British and Irish, proponents of a more laissez-faire brand of capitalism, objected to a clause that would grant some latitude to the EU to determine rates of taxation. The Finns said the French plan would shift power inside the bloc toward domination by the “Big Four”--Germany, France, Britain and Italy.

Portuguese Foreign Minister Jaime Gama concurred with Finland, demanding a revamping of the proposals on weighted voting to avoid “humiliating” smaller nations like his own. In Warsaw, the government of EU applicant Poland also made known its displeasure, noting that the new formula would award Spain more votes, even though it has about the same population as Poland.

Under fire from their partners, some of whom privately accused France of refusing to compromise on points they themselves consider inviolable, the summit hosts went back to the drawing board.

Reform is also needed of the 20-member commission that Prodi chairs, because under current EU rules, each new member would be entitled to send a commissioner to Brussels. That would eventually create a huge, impossibly cumbersome executive.

That question seemed well on its way to resolution Saturday. The four larger countries have offered at the summit to sacrifice one of the two commissioners each now has. The French proposed that in an interim period, each country could continue to have a commissioner but that by 2010 at the latest, the commission would be capped at 20. Membership would rotate among countries afterward regardless of their size.

What has happened in Nice is typical of the EU. The members agree that change is mandatory before entry of the applicants now lined up--Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Cyprus and Malta. But they can’t agree on what to do.

When it comes to squaring the circle, however, EU leaders are proven masters of geometry. Decades of seeming impasses and wearying negotiations haven’t prevented the development of a multi-nation grouping like no other, with 370 million inhabitants, a fledgling single currency, coordinated foreign policy and 38,000 pages of common regulations on everything from farm subsidies to a commitment to linking all schools to the Internet by 2002.

“I don’t want to speculate about failure,” Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson told reporters earlier. “All political logic tells me we’ll finally find an agreement on how to distribute power.”

Even if they do fail to find agreement on some contentious issues, as was the case in Amsterdam three years ago, the leaders could refer them to yet another round of negotiations, proposed by Germany for 2004.

The French, who dream of Europe’s becoming a political and military counterweight to American influence throughout the world, did have to pull in their horns on the matter of defense policy. A year ago in Helsinki, the Finnish capital, the EU countries ordered the creation of their own 60,000-strong rapid-reaction corps to deal with regional crises or humanitarian emergencies.

In Nice, the leaders approved creation of civilian and military agencies to oversee the force, but when Chirac publicly said it should be “independent” of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, from which France withdrew its military forces in 1966, he ignited a fury in the British press.

At the insistence of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a draft statement on EU security and defense policy now emphasizes that Europe’s aim is not a separate army and that “NATO remains the basis of the collective defense of its members.”

In Brussels on Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen issued a sharply worded warning that unless the European Union seeks open relations with NATO, the Atlantic alliance that has helped keep the peace in Europe for more than half a century risks becoming “a relic of the past.”