Big EU Powers Come Out Ahead in Summit

Once the clouds of self-congratulation dispersed Monday from the European Union’s marathon summit on the French Riviera, it became clear that the four biggest states of the 15-nation alliance had used the forum more to solidify their clout than to remove obstacles to eastward expansion.

Germany emerged as the main winner as it secured de facto recognition of its weight as the most populous state of the EU and prevailed in its call for a fresh round of reform talks in 2004. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder also won his fight to secure Poland equal power with Spain once the German neighbor joins the alliance.

France got what it wanted, as President Jacques Chirac had vowed to preserve voting parity among the influential foursome, which also includes Britain and Italy. Although Germany’s bigger population will allow it to block certain actions, the treaty adopted in Nice maintains the appearance of equal weight among the big states and therefore spared Chirac the need for an embarrassing concession.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair also was able to claim victory after the tense, behind-the-scenes wrangling that lasted five days, two more than originally scheduled. He managed to protect national veto power over key issues such as taxation and immigration against strong pressure to abandon the stifling requirement for unanimous votes.

But what was considered good for the big guys did not necessarily serve the broader interests of the bloc. The summit managed only minimal structural reforms to streamline decision-making as the alliance prepares to nearly double the number of its member states.

“Even if there are two or three good things that come out of this summit, the European Union will absolutely not be prepared for enlargement,” a former EU commissioner, Karel van Miert, told Belgium’s RTBF radio. “Most of today’s government leaders do not have the ambition or the courage to put the EU on track for enlargement.”

The summit was supposed to trim the top-heavy bureaucracy in Brussels ahead of expansion, which is expected to add 12 members from Eastern and Southern Europe over the next decade. But smaller countries already in the EU, such as Belgium and Portugal, feared that their authority would be diluted by enlargement if the summit agreed to cap or even reduce the current 20-member European Commission, the group’s executive arm, and apportion seats for the smaller states by rotation.

Instead, the summit leaders decided to give each new member state its own seat until the administrative body reaches 27 and to allow Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain to retain two seats each on the commission until 2005. Bloated superstructure is most often blamed for slow decision-making in Brussels, and critics said the Nice agreement failed to address this stumbling block.

“It makes the whole decision-making procedure more difficult in the future,” complained Elmar Brok, the European Parliament’s representative at the reform talks, who hails from Germany. Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres denounced the voting and power-sharing provisions proposed by France and refined by the Germans as “a coup d’etat by the big member states.”

The four biggest EU members managed to increase their relative power by upping the threshold for majority voting from 69% to 73.4% and by implementing a complicated two-tier system that requires decisions to be made by a coalition of states representing at least 62% of the EU population. The latter clause means that Germany can use its 82 million population--20 million more than any of the other big states--to block a majority decision by aligning with two other populous members.

Despite his successes, Schroeder told journalists that he wished the summit had done more to cut the strangling red tape of EU administration.

“We managed to get done what was doable this time,” Schroeder said after the summit finally ended at 4:15 a.m. “But we had really wanted a reduction in the size of the commission.”

Germany has been one of the most vocal advocates of enlargement, as the inclusion of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other former Communist states in Eastern Europe will shift the economic powerhouse from the EU fringes to the geographic center of Europe. Schroeder also has promised to get the best deal it can for Poland as a means of “historical atonement,” since it was Nazi Germany’s 1939 invasion of its neighbor that ravaged the Polish economy and allowed its post-World War II domination by the Soviet Union.

Blair, who faces a tough reelection battle early next year, tried to steer his country away from the EU’s harmonizing tendencies for fear of handing ammunition to conservative opponents skeptical of an emerging European superstate.

“The whole of this summit for us was about getting the best for Britain out of Europe,” Blair told a closing news conference with unabashed candor. “We have not accepted any area that we did not desire to accept.”

That included retaining veto power for Britain on tax and social spending as well as shaping the EU position on creation of a rapid-reaction military force in a way acceptable to U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

France managed to get some trade provisions exempted from majority voting, such as the veto it retains on issues affecting its film industry.

Even Spain was able to persuade the French hosts to enshrine its status as the largest recipient of “cohesion funds” in the treaty, securing a guarantee of its current EU aid levels through 2013 despite the competition for those handouts expected from poorer eastern states as they become members.

The concessions given to the big EU players prevented the summit from collapsing in acrimony. But some participants conceded that the much-touted reforms were a sadly watered-down version of the expected achievements.

“We are going to scale down our ambitions, and then, in the great European tradition, call it a success,” Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg said of the results.