EU Constitution

26 Pages 6412 Words

d closed doors. It is also sprawlingly big. Theoretically a single unit, it now meets in some 23 gatherings of national ministers, from foreign affairs and finance to education and environment. And it has suffered from enlargement. There is a huge difference between six five-minute speeches from ministers in 1970 and 15 from ministers today. If the Union grows to 25, entire council meetings could be taken up with a simple tour de table.
Such unwieldiness combines with only brief forays to Brussels by ministers to hand vast dollops of power to their officials, especially to the Committee of Permanent Representatives, better known by its French acronym, Coreper (see our next article). Every day, 1,000 delegates attend some 20 council working-group meetings. About 90% of council decisions are taken before ministers ever get entwined. And ministers often prove bad even at agreeing on the 10% that are too controversial for officials to resolve, especially when they need unanimous approval.
If a specialist council cannot agree, the foreign ministers are meant to step in. But they increasingly discuss only foreign affairs; internal disputes are often referred up to the twice-yearly summits of heads of government. The growing dominance of the European Council, as this very top body is called, is one of the biggest EU changes since its inception. When it began in the early 1970s, the idea was that heads of government should meet informally for a fireside chat. Now each presidency works towards a climax of decisions at summits normally held in June and December. And the conclusions from each summit tend to map out the agenda for the whole EU.
Plenty of problems affect this system. Heads of government are not close enough to most issues to debate them properly, so they often rubber-stamp agreements reached by officials. Pushing so much up to summit meetings encourages a “package” approach that often wraps up unrelated issues in gargantuan a...