 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
 Rotten At The Core
Should Germany and France still be driving E.U. integration? Or it is time for someone else to have a go? |
|
|
All in the Family
Anti-Americanism bad; "Shared values" good |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Davos 2003
Voices of a New Generation [Jan. 27, 2003] |
|
|
 |
|
WEF 2002
Protests: Mild at Heart [Feb. 4, 2002] |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
E-mail your letter to the editor
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted Sunday, January 25, 2004; 14.53GMT
 The proposed E.U. constitution is proving just as divisive. Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the E.U. until the end of June, vowed last week to push hard to resolve the differences over voting weights. Good luck, Bertie. Germany and France, along with most smaller member states, argue that the enlarged Union will be more able to reach effective agreement under population-based voting weights recommended by the draft constitution. Spain and Poland prefer the stronger positions they were accorded under the 2000 Nice Treaty. In Poland, where the government's no-compromise stance has been one of its only popular moves in months, Deputy Prime Minister Józef Oleksy told TIME that a new pragmatism has been budding there of late. But most Brussels observers believe that no early resolution of the constitutional questions is in the offing.
The traffic jams caused by an E.U. made up of a core and a periphery are not confined to constitutional matters and macroeconomics.
Take the energy sector. Britain has a free market in energy, in which the French firms EDF and GDF are big players. British energy companies, on the other hand, haven't got much of a foothold in France, where the slow pace of liberalization means that the state-owned players still dominate. Noëlle Lenoir, France's Deputy Minister for European Affairs, acknowledges the problem. "We haven't adapted our public service to transposing E.U. laws, and we have to," she admits.
Perhaps because the Franco-German concept of "core Europe" is so ill-defined, some view it warily. Petr Necas, a deputy chairman of the Czech parliament's Committee for European Integration, sees it as "an anti-American project" aimed at creating "some kind of French-German directorate" that would undermine the North Atlantic alliance. Recognizing that, Germany and France have been successfully courting Britain to give their sputtering motor another piston. The three forged a compromise last November on an E.U. defense identity that doesn't threaten NATO; on Feb. 18 they'll meet again for what one Blair aide calls "a real attempt to make trilateralism work."
Despite this latest round of disputes, the idea of an E.U. in which members move at different speeds is nothing new: Britain, Sweden and Denmark remain out of the euro, and Britain and Ireland never signed on to the Schengen agreement easing border crossings. If Germany and France want to stay at the head of the pack now, they'll need to turn their idea of a "core Europe" from a menace back into a motor.
With reporting by William Boston/Berlin, Leo Cendrowicz/Brussels, Helen Gibson and J.F.O. McAllister/London, Tadeusz L. Kucharski/Warsaw and Jan Stojaspal/Prague
|
|
Premium Content
