European Foundation Intelligence Digest

 

Issue No. 180                                                                                                                                                                        12th November 2003

 


I.  Draft constitution continues to wobble

 

Little support for common interior policy

The proposal in the European draft constitution to create an EU prosecutor with the task of fighting cross-border crime and “threats to the interests of the Union” is causing controversy among EU member states discussing the draft in the Intergovernmental Conference. The European Commission has presented these parts of the draft constitution as “a considerable advance,” but six member states have now told the Italian presidency that they are not prepared to give up the national veto on the new powers which, it is proposed, will be transferred to the EU.  The Republic of Ireland has demanded a general revision of all the articles in that part of the draft, and it is saying that the Convention did not spend enough time discussing them seriously.  The United Kingdom, Austria, Portugal and Slovakia have also expressed their opposition to the project.  Sweden has called for safeguard clauses which would allow states to use a veto if absolutely necessary.  Finland has joined Britain in saying that the crimes with which the common policy would deal should be very clearly defined, which is not the case in the current draft.  The text there says that the crimes covered could change as criminality itself evolves.  But the most controversial proposal is to create an EU prosecutor.  Ireland, Finland, Britain and Slovakia want this clause simply deleted.  Latvia has also expressed its doubts.  Austria and the Czech Republic wants the prosecutor’s planned responsibilities to be limited.  These difficulties add to the existing unease about common policies on justice and home affairs:  the European arrest warrant, which is supposed to enter into force on 1st January 2004, is severely criticised in Italy, where the No. 3 in the Government Umberto Bossi, has said that it will create “a dictatorial system”.  To date, only three out of the 15 EU member states have implemented into their national law the provisions required for the common arrest warrant – Denmark, Spain and Portugal.  [Thomas Ferenczi, Le Monde, 6th November 2003]

 

Spain and France disagree on constitution

At the 14th Franco-Spanish summit held in Carcassonne on 6th November, the French President and the Spanish Prime Minister found that they disagree completely about the proposed European Constitution.  The French are opposed to any undoing of the draft text, while the Spanish reject the draft’s current proposal to change the votes which each country will have in the Council of Ministers.  The two countries were therefore completely unable to come to any agreement on the matter, and were reduced to expressing hope that they will find a solution in the future.  Both Spain and Poland are refusing to abandon the voting arrangements which were agreed on at Nice, and which were incorporated in the Nice treaty.  (Attentive followers of such matters will recall that it is the Nice Treaty, and not the new European Constitution, which was supposed to prepare the EU for enlargement.)  In that treaty, Poland and Spain have 27 votes in the Council of Ministers, as against 29 for the four big countries (France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom).  The Convention proposes to change this by giving more power, relatively speaking, to the larger countries. Two ideas are now being put about to find a way out of this impasse:  either the percentage of votes needed to pass an EU law will be raised from the proposed 60% to 66% of the EU’s population – which would give Spain and Poland the same blocking power as they have in Nice – or the proposal to reduce the Commission to 15 commissars would be dropped.  Yet in Jacques Chirac’s entourage, it has been said recently that the President does not think that the principle of “one country, one commissar” “corresponds to the European spirit.”  So the negotiations are blocked, even though Paris still claims that it thinks that agreement can be reached on the Constitution by the end of the year.  [Le Monde, 6th November 2003]

 

Finns start to have doubts about enlargement

On the occasion of his visit to Paris, the Finnish Prime Minister, Matti Vanhanen, also expressed his opposition to the proposed European Constitution to his French opposite number, Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Apparently the Finns are unhappy that they do not have a Director General in the Commission, and that they failed to get the European Food Agency located in Helsinki.  The Prime Minister has also expressed his regret that Finland had no chairmanship in the presidium of the Convention, and that the country’s voice went unheard in the negotiations for the new Constitution.  “Now we are told,” says the prime minister, “that we must accept the compromise of the constitution but there was no compromise in the first place.” Finland is now leading the pack of small countries which are battling to reduce the domination of large countries, as they see it, for which the draft Constitution provides.  Finland is no Eurosceptic country, however:  it wants as many powers transferred to the European level as possible, and it wants the Commission to be as powerful as possible.  Indeed, it sees in these moves the best way to limit the power of the big states.  So Finland has joined other countries in demanding that all EU member states have a commissar in Brussels. [Arnaud Leparmentier, Le Monde, 11th November 2003]

 

Giscard tries to drum up support

Faced with this mounting criticism of his draft text, the president of the European Convention, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has said that Europe will make no progress unless it adopts a new constitution.  Speaking at meeting in the historic St. Paul’s church in Frankfurt - where the first liberal constitution for Germany was proposed, and where the Holy Roman Emperor used to be elected – Giscard said that all the necessary compromises were already in the text.  He said that changes were now acceptable only on two conditions:  that they be inspired by “the European spirit” and not by “national special interests”, and that they are supported by all countries.  The commissar with responsibility for enlargement, Günter Verheugen, attacked Poland for sticking doggedly to its determination to maintain the blocking minority within the Council of Ministers.  He said that the purpose of changing the voting arrangements was to achieve workable majorities.  Verheugen also said that it was wrong to campaign for one commissar for each country:  “A commissar does not represent the interests of the country from which he comes,” he said.  The Prime Minister of Luxembourg expressed regret that some passages of the constitution were “unintelligible”, but still he said that the draft should not now be revisited.  Jean-Claude Juncker also said that he regretted that “the social question” had been unsatisfactorily dealt with, and he said that Europe would have to agree on minimum rights for workers.  The minister-president of the German state of Hessen expressed his regret that the Constitution made no reference to the Christian roots of Europe.  Giscard responded that there was a reference to religion in the preamble, and to the collective inheritance of “Athens and Rome”.

            The meeting was also addressed by the president of the German constitutional court, who said that the draft Constitution was disappointing because it did not establish a clear list of powers which were to be wielded at the EU level, and of those which are supposed to remain the preserve of nation-states.  The creation of such a list had been one of the principal arguments in favour of having a constitution in the first place.  Professor Dr. Dr. hc Hans-Jürgen Papier said that the draft did not allow the EU to award itself new powers, and this was welcome because the German constitutional court had itself ruled out such a possibility when it approved the Maastricht treaty.  Meanwhile, the former president of the European Court of Justice, Rodriguez Iglesias, said that there were now three bases of fundamental rights in Europe:  national constitutions, the EU Constitution, and the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the EU is itself not a party.  [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7th November 2003]

 

Austria gets awkward over enlargement – again

A debate in the Austrian Parliament, which is being held to ratify the enlargement of the EU to include 10 new member states, has been delayed from 12th November to 3rd December.  This small technical delay is being used by Vienna to indicate its disappointment that the other EU member states have not managed to reach any agreement limiting the amount of lorry traffic which passes through Austria.  According to Die Presse, the decision to delay the ratification of enlargement was suggested by Jörg Haider, the Governor of Carinthia, who has often threatened to veto the enlargement of the EU.  The EU’s agriculture commissar, the Austrian Franz Fischler, has warned his countrymen against adopting a vengeful attitude towards Brussels.  The question of traffic transit has thus become “a national cause”, in the words of the Austrian Chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, who himself threatened to veto enlargement but even negotiations with the four main parties represented in the Austrian Parliament has not enabled his government to reach agreement on how to limit the trucks without violating the Community principle of free circulation of goods.  There are now 1.7 million trucks per year which cross Austria; a figure which could rise to 2.5 million once the EU is enlarged.  Anger is already mounting in the provinces which are most affected by lorry traffic – Salzburg, Tyrol and Vorarlberg.  People are starting to talk of blocking the roads if some means is not found to limit the traffic.  [Joëlle Stolz, Le Monde, 11th November 2003]

 

EU divided over Russia

As if this disagreement were not enough, the EU is also speaking with numerous different voices in foreign policy.  The latest cause of division is the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who attended the EU summit in Brussels last Friday.  In particular, a rift has opened up (or re-opened) between the two Italians who run the EU, Silvio Berlusconi, the president of the European Council, and Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission.  On 7th November, the Commission spokesman delivered an unprecedented rebuff to Mr. Berlusconi, who had delivered a more or less unconditional message of support to the Russian president’s actions in Chechnya and over the arrest of oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.  The Commission accused Berlusconi of speaking only on his own behalf, and of not representing the opinions of the 15 EU member states.  On 8th November, Le Monde weighed in calling Mr. Berlusconi “a disgrace to Europe” in one of its headlines.  People are especially hostile to Mr. Putin at the moment because of the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky at the end of last month.  Mr. Putin’s enemies are also cranking up the rhetoric over the war in Chechnya - even though the war has been going on there for years now, and Russian military operations against Chechen separatists were far more brutal under Boris Yeltsin. 

            The Italian Prime Minister’s office delivered a swift rebuke to the statement from Brussels, saying that if the Commission had wanted to express its view, it could have done so during the summit with Mr. Putin, or in the press conference afterwards.  It is indeed the case that no EU representative said anything about the war in Chechnya during the meetings with Mr. Putin, and it is therefore to be suspected that the real reason for the Commission’s hostility is, in fact, the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky.

            The intra-EU divisions are all the more intriguing because Jacques Chirac has been cosying up to Mr. Putin as well:  the Russian President was recently warmly received recently in Paris.  Jacques Chirac took the unusual step of accompanying Mr. Putin in his car all the way to Orly airport, a gesture which was intended to emphasise the importance which Paris attached to a strategic relationship with Moscow.  Paris therefore remained very diplomatic in its statements about Mr. Berlusconi’s declaration.  But the Danish and Swedish governments sided with the Commission when they said that their policy, and that of the European Union, consisted in emphasising that Russia is obliged to prevent human rights violations in Chechnya.  [Laurent Zecchini, Le Monde, 8th November 2003]

 

II.               Other European News

 

New row about the war in Germany

Another huge row has broken out in Germany about the Second World War.  A Christian Democrat Member of the Bundestag, Martin Hohmann, said that it was just as wrong to say that the Germans were collectively guilty of the Nazi genocide as it would be to say that the Jews were collectively guilty of the massacres committed by the Bolsheviks in Russia.  This has caused the most amazing stink in Germany, with calls by the German Interior Minister, Otto Schily, for the offending politician to be expelled from his party.  Schily accused Mr. Hohmann of “trying to stir up brown sauce”, a reference to Nazism.  But the General Secretary of the Christian Democrats, Lorenz Meyer, said that the decision had been taken not to expel the man.  He has instead been publicly rebuked, and removed from the Bundestag’s committee on home affairs.  Meyer said that a motion to expel Hohmann could get the party bogged down in years of dispute.  The Israeli ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, said that the remarks reflected a wider problem in German society, and that the matter was not confined to the Christian Democrats.  [Die Welt, 10th November, 2003]

            However, an opinion poll has found that 79% of Germans think that Germans have a positive attitude towards Jews.  Only 1% of those questioned said they thought that Germans had a negative view of Jews.  85% of those questioned said they would have no objection to having a Jewish neighbour, and 13% said they would positively like to have one.  65% of those questioned said they saw in the policies of Israel a cause of critical statements about Jews; 52% said that the cause was reparations paid to Israel by Germany; 32% said that the “economic power of Jews” was a cause.  The President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Paul Spiegel, said that Martin Hohmann has aligned himself with “right-wing extremist arsonists.”  Hohmann was also sharply criticised by Edmund Stoiber, the prime minister of Bavaria and the leading Christian Democrat politician in Germany.  [Die Welt, 10th November 2003]

 

Row breaks out about Muslims too

A Christian Democrat politician in Germany has also caused ructions by saying “a Muslim would rather cut his hand off than put a cross on his ballot paper for the Christian Democratic Union.”  Henry Nitzsche’s remarks seem to have been designed to scupper recent attempts by the Christian Democrats to attract the votes of Muslims in Germany.  Currently only 12% or 15% of voters of Turkish origin vote for the Christian Democrats.  There are three themes in which Turkish voters are interested, according to a recent survey: anti-discrimination, Turkish entry into the EU; and the fight against right-wing radicalism.  None of these policies is identified with the CDU.  Not only are Christian Democrats opposed to Turkish membership of the EU, they also reacted with great reluctance when the governing party in Turkey itself applied to be admitted to the European People’s Party in which the CDU has a prominent position.  [Yassin Musharbash, Der Spiegel, 7th November 2003]

 

Mr. Fini goes to Jerusalem

The deputy prime minister of Italy, Gianfranco Fini, is to travel to Israel on 23rd November.  The visit represents the culmination of Mr. Fini’s make-over from neo-fascist to neo-conservative:  whereas in 1994, Gianfranco Fini declared Mussolini to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, he has progressively shed his image as a blackshirt to become, instead, a friend of America and Israel.    In December 1993, Fini paid a secret visit (which he subsequently made public) to the Fosse Ardeatine, where three hundred Roman citizens were executed by the Nazis in reprisal for a bomb attack on their soldiers in the Via Rasella in Rome.  In 1994, he told a Jewish newspaper that the racial laws proclaimed by the fascist regime in Italy were the cause of atrocities.  In 1995, when Fini took over the fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, and changed its name to Alleanza Nazionale, the party adopted a declaration against racism and anti-Semitism.  In 1999, he visited Auschwitz, where he quoted Primo Levi’s saying that “no tragedy can be greater than the Holocaust”. In January 2002, Fini took part in the anti-fascist Day of Memory, saying that he was determined that history not repeat itself; and when a Jewish cemetery was profaned in April of that year, he described the attack as “an infamy which provokes a sense of horror and offends the conscience of all.”  In December 2002, Fini told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “I ask pardon (for the racial laws) as an Italian,” and he insisted that he had nothing in common with Jean-Marie Le Pen or Jörg Haider.  In October 2002, Fini received the Israeli minister of health, Nissin Dahan, who said that Fini would visit Israel soon.  By 2003, it was Silvio Berlusconi, and not Fini, who was tarred with the philo-fascist brush, when he told The Spectator that Mussolini never killed anyone.  A few days later Fini told La Repubblica that he had closed any relationship with fascism and that his party was not the inheritor of Mussolini’s.  The visit to Israel will conclude, and in some senses crown, Mr. Fini’s long road to respectability.  Next stop – Palazzo Chigi?  [Marco Bracconi, La Repubblica, 10th November 2003]

 

Does Paris have a new nuclear doctrine?

A report in Libération has sparked off speculation that France may have effected a wholesale conversion of its nuclear policy, from an essentially defensive posture to a more pro-active one.  According to the report, France intends in future that its nuclear capability might be used not only defensively but also pre-emptively against “rogue states” with weapons of mass destruction.  It is alleged that the new doctrine has been elaborated over the last few years in the strictest secrecy”.  The Elysée Palace has denied that there has been any change in doctrine, but Libération has retorted tartly that its own report said precisely that the new doctrine was about to be implemented, not that it already had been.  But there have been indications that the ground is being prepared for an announcement.  The French defence minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie said on Monday that France would remain vigilant to the threat posed by undemocratic and uncontrollable states like North Korea, Iran and Pakistan.  Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, told the Institute for National Defence Studies that France’s nuclear doctrine had to meet new threats.  “Our nuclear capabilities are increasingly directed towards a new scenario of blackmail and threats,” he said.  That this new situation would need new atomic weapons had been admitted by Chirac some two years previously, when he said that France had to have a credible arsenal in order to maintain deterrence against new threats.  According to Libération, €17 billion have been set-aside for this between now and 2008.  This represents some 20% of the whole of France’s military budget.  The centrepiece of the new doctrine involves the development of weapons which could surgically destroy military or economic power centres without causing massive civilian casualties.  This means the construction of “mini-nukes” which could destroy the bunker of an enemy president or subterranean military facilities.  This is very similar to plans also under study in the Pentagon.  [Jochen Hehn, Die Welt, 4th November 2003]

 

Commission adopts ‘grands travaux’

The European Commission has announced 20 large public works projects whose total cost will be some €220 billion, and whose purpose is to stimulate growth in an enlarged EU.  The plan is for a series of large construction projects, each in more than one country.  They include projects in the new member states, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.  However, it remains unclear how they are to be financed.  The Commission’s transport budget is “only” €700 million per year.  The solution might be to take the money out of the regional aid budget, often used for building motorways, and to put it into rail construction instead. [Arnaud Leparmentier & Philippe Ricard, Le Monde, 11th November 2003]