What does Germany want?
José M. de Areilza
September 30, 2006
The constitutional debate so many times buried in the past two years is still alive and kicking. President Barroso has realized he has to tackle it in order to move forward. Even to launch a pragmatic “Europe of Projects”, around issues like energy, inmigration or R+D, he needs to achieve a constitutional settlement first.
Nicholas Sarkozy has moved first, proposing a mini-treaty as a substitute to the Constitution, with all the things that French mandarins like about the rejected text (new qualified majority rules, smaller Commission, Minister of Foreign Affairs…) and without the name Constitution or the need to call for a second referendum (or a first one in the UK)! Romano Prodi has quickly endorsed these proposals. But what does Germany want? After all, the German Presidency in the first semester of 2007 has received a very open ended mandate from the European Council to propose solutions to the ratification of the failed European Constitution.
There are, however, three contradicting streaks in Germany’s European policy. The first one is growing official Euro-skepticism. Social-democratas and Christian-democrats in Merkels’ government have found common ground in their resistance to more European legislation or more funding. The second element is the desire to get more votes in the Council of Ministers and obtain institutional recognition as the largest Member State and the most influential one after the 2004 enlargement. Thirdly, Germany still wants to look after some European interests and would like to incorporate small and medium size Member states to the European debate and not risk a bigger gap between big and small, new and old Member States. It is not convinced by some French views that blame enlargement and want to move towards closer integration of a few veteran Member States. Only after these points of views have been confronted and debated at home, there will be a clearer picture of what Germany wants.
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