Global Debates

The recent European Council meeting (held in Brussels on 15-16 June) will surely be remembered as one of the emptiest European Council meetings in years. But emptiness is seldom innocuous: the great nothingness in which Europe has developed since the failed referendum in France last year is slowly but relentlessly swallowing entire bits of EU’s future. Many argue that the Constitution should be buried in order to spare much-needed political energies for practical policies. But EU leaders have just refused to move justice and police matters to qualified-majority voting- a measure which would have enhanced national governments’ capacity to fight illegal immigration and transnational organized crime. Then, as they slept on the Constitutional project – containing rules which are essential for the EU to be able to effectively function at 27 members – they spent considerable time and energy discussing whether the Union should enlarge further or not.
But this is the tail-that-wags-the dog approach. Romania and Bulgaria are already scheduled to join in January next year and Croatia and Turkey’s accessions are not imminent. Besides, the European Parliament has already approved a resolution stating that there won’t be any new accession within the Nice Treaty current legal framework. This makes sense because the institutions of the Nice Treaty cannot take the EU beyond 27 members. Still, the Union’s current problems will not be solved by saying “No” to Macedonia, Montenegro or Turkey: they will be solved if and when the Constitution (or something resembling it) enters into force. EU leaders may then spend the rest of the year discussing about “absorption criteria”, but they won’t be able to hide that the overall discussion is about “enlargement fatigue”. Meeting the challenges of the 2004 enlargement is energy-demanding, but leaders are tired and would rather not bother to adapt to changes. The Union has already developed sound political, economic and administrative membership criteria referring to democracy, market economy, the rule of law (see the EU Treaty’s article 49). The “absorption capacity” is thus on the table already since 1993, when the Copenhagen European Council stated that the Union may welcome new members “while maintaining the momentum of European integration”. But what some EU leaders want to discuss now is a different thing: many would want to definitively close the Union to new members as a precondition for further integration, which is a complete different thing.
Those who want definitive borders should be honest about it and promote an open discussion. It will do good to the EU to discuss these things. For a change, that would replace policy-making by subterfuges, which is today’s dominant policy mode. What does not make sense is to ask candidate countries to meet the accession criteria for opening the negotiations, then force them to go through lengthy negotiations over 35 chapters and then, when negotiations are finalized, tell them that despite meeting all the criteria, the EU cannot take them in because its absorption capacity is exhausted. But common sense is a scarce commodity these days.