The original source for this lecture is: www.europarl.europa.eu/president
Speech of Hans-Gert Pöttering,
President of the European Parliament,
at the EU Studies Center of the
City University of New York
(in consortium with Columbia University)
Monday 11 February 2008
at 18.00 hours
The European Parliament: Politics and Power in the EU’s
Joint Legislature
Chairman, thank you for that very kind introduction,
I must say that it is a great pleasure to be here with you this evening. I was delighted to accept your invitation to meet with and address some of the many students and academics here in New York City who are studying the institutions and policies of the European Union.
I am delighted that the City University of New York is working with Columbia University, where I had the privilege to do research back in 1971, to deepen understanding of the Union. It is excellent that the European Commission, strongly supported by the European Parliament, helps fund academic study of the EU in the United States.
I always find it fascinating being in this country because of your own experience of operating a federal system on a continental scale. I know that you too are keen to share your thinking with practitioners such as myself, engaged in the day-to-day business of building a new political system in Europe. There is a lot we can learn from each other.
As you have already heard, I have been a Member of the European Parliament for almost thirty years, one of only a handful originally elected in the first direct elections in June 1979. So I have seen the Parliament evolve from a marginal force in the Community system to a major institutional actor in the Union today.
As leader of the largest political group - the center-right EPP-ED Group - for seven and a half years, and now as President of the Parliament since last January, I have also been able to play a very active role in shaping the way the Parliament has evolved over the last decade in particular.
So I would like to share with you some brief observations on politics and power in the European Parliament, as I have experienced them, and talk a little bit about my own agenda as President now. I would like to leave plenty of time for questions and observations from the floor, so that we can have a good dialogue on the issues that interest you.
I might also mention that I have brought with me Klaus Welle, now head of my cabinet (or private office), who has also been an important player at a staff level in the development of the Parliament in recent years. He was Secretary General of the European People’s Party (the European political party) and of the EPP-ED Group in the Parliament. More recently, he has become one of the Parliament’s top civil servants, playing a major role in reforming internal procedures within the house.
xxx A rising curve of power xxx
When I first entered the European Parliament in 1979, the role of our institution was rather limited.
The old EC decision-making system meant the Commission proposed, the Council decided, and the Parliament gave an opinion in between. The Parliament could, and occasionally did, refuse to give an opinion and so delay a decision in Council within reason – the famous ‘Isoglucose’ case. But we had no standing in the detail of the legislative process, where real power lay.
As most decisions were taken in the Council by unanimity, the Commission looked to the member states for their cues, not to the Parliament. Decision-making was slow and very cautious.
We had two ‘nuclear’ weapons at our disposal – the ability to dismiss the Commission and to reject the budget. These were important powers and they gave the Parliament a certain credibility. The problem was that they were blunt instruments, and ultimately they could only be used in ways that were as likely to damage Europe as to strengthen Europe.
In those days, I myself served as chairman of the Parliament’s subcommittee on security and disarmament. The situation there was even worse. The reaction of many people was one of polite indifference, not least in the Council. The idea of any European policy in the foreign policy field - let alone any serious parliamentary say on the matter - seemed quite visionary.
It was only with the Single European Act (in 1986) and Maastricht Treaty (in 1992) that things began to change. The Parliament acquired real legislative power for the first time – with co-decision – and the area of qualified majority voting in the Council dramatically widened, often in the same fields. These twin changes – co-decision and QMV – revitalised the Community.
By the early 1990s, the new European Union had at last the means to take difficult decisions for Europe. Starting with the single market, transport policy, and the environment – and then in increasingly wider fields after that – we started to get serious legislative results from the EU system. They were outcomes in which the view of a majority the European Parliament mattered.
The rising curve of Parliament’s power continued with the Amsterdam and Nice Treaties (of 1997 and 2001). The new Lisbon Treaty brings this process to a natural conclusion. From now on, in nearly all policy areas, the Council and the Parliament will be the joint legislature of the Union. Co-decision will include agriculture, fisheries and international trade. In addition, the Parliament will have a right of veto on all international agreements (and not just some), and will be genuinely co-equal with the Council on all aspects of the budget.
xxx Shaping Europe’s political agenda xxx
In parallel to the rise of Parliament’s formal power, there has been a huge widening of its indirect influence over policies and priorities within the Union.
You can see this on many fronts. One of the reasons that the Parliament only needs to reject a small number of proposed EU laws - only a handful in each five-year term - is because the Commission is now quite careful now to judge in advance their acceptability to the Parliament.
When issues are controversial, the view of the Parliament is often decisive. On the services and chemicals directives – the two most important proposals so far in this term of the European Parliament (2004-09) – the key compromises were struck in the Parliament, between the two largest political groups – not, as would have been the case in the past, between the Council and the Commission. Indeed on the services directive, the Commission simply took the Parliament’s agreed position and published it as their own revised proposal.
The composition of the Commission itself no longer appears like a deus ex machina from the European Council, handed down by the member states every five years without any EP role. In 2004, we established that member states cannot ignore the centre of political gravity in deciding who to recommend as Commission President.
As the largest political family emerging from the European elections, the EPP and its allies insisted on José Manuel Barroso as President, rather than Guy Verhofstadt, whom certain governments wished to appoint. As leader of the EPP-ED Group at the time, I played an important part in this historic process.
The policy agenda of the Barroso Commission since autumn 2004 has reflected the broad majority view in the Parliament – with its emphasis on promoting the Lisbon Strategy for economic reform, on taking climate change seriously, on tackling international crime whilst respecting human rights, and on engaging in ‘Better Law-Making’, to improve the quality and coherence of legislation and regulation.
As President of the Parliament, I see the enormous influence we can exercise in promoting issues and shaping debate at European level. For example, one of my own objectives is to promote a dialogue of cultures, precisely to avoid a clash of civilisations. The EU institutions are taking that dialogue increasingly seriously, with a whole range of initiatives and events, including the designation of 2008 as European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.
On an allied issue, we are pushing for a European dimension to the Middle East peace process. The post-war European experience of creating regional inter-dependence and promoting economic recovery has potential lessons for the Middle East. Equally a dialogue between parliamentarians of the sort only we can sponsor can add value to traditional diplomacy between governments. As co-chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, which includes deputies from both Israel and Palestine, I am working hard to open up new vistas of cooperation.
xxx Impact of the Lisbon Treaty xxx
The European Parliament today combines the three core functions of any normal parliament in a democratic system of government: it passes law, it holds the executive to account, and it acts as a focal point of collective debate. We have come a very long way from the situation I first experienced 29 years ago - when in effect it did none of those things - and people used to say ‘the European Parliament is not a real parliament’. Nobody says that today.
This process of institutional growth and development is set to continue. I have already mentioned the way in which the Lisbon Treaty increases the legislative and budgetary powers of the Parliament. But there is a second, and extremely important, way in which it could well enhance the Parliament’s position.
The Treaty increases the day-today working interface between the Council and the Parliament, and so makes more likely that the Council will wish to, and perhaps need to, work more closely together with the Parliament in the years to come. The Council will be less able to continue as a separate sphere on its own, driven by an intergovernmental mentality. Relations will be much more of a genuine inter-institutional triangle, in which the Parliament is an equal player.
Let me give you some examples.
The Council will be divided organisationally from now on, between the European Council and the Council of Ministers. Each will be an institution in its own right. A new ‘permanent’ President of the European Council will be created, alongside the existing national presidency of the Council of Ministers. This job will last for two and a half years and be renewable.
Some important questions follow. Should the European Council have its own budget? Who should report to the European Parliament after each summit – the prime minister of the rotating presidency or the permanent President? These are issues which can longer be decided without the agreement of the European Parliament.
More generally, the new permanent President of the European Council will be in search of a role. How far will he or she be the public face of the European Union? What new functions will that person seek to acquire? One important role which the new President can play is to engage in a greater degree of joint legislative planning. Up until now, that process in the Council has been entirely inward looking. Now it may want to look outward to the other branch of the new joint legislature, the Parliament.
Or take the new High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy. Up until now, the cross-over between the Council’s actions in the CFSP field and the other institutions, both Commission and Parliament, has been very limited. Lisbon changes this in many ways. First, the upgraded High Representative will also serve as a Vice President of the European Commission. As such, his appointment will need to be approved by the Parliament. Second, he will chair the Council of Foreign Ministers and have a merged European External Action Service at his disposal. The EEAS’s budget will require EP approval and its role will be subject to much greater parliamentary scrutiny than the Council services at least are used to.
A final example: the appointment of the President of the European Commission. A little-noticed declaration (Number 11) to the new Treaty asks the European Council and Parliament to engage in a pre-dialogue about the appointment of the Commission President every five years. Understandably, after what happened in 2004, the heads of government will not want to fire a shot and miss the target. They will prefer to be reasonably confident that any name they propose will find favour with the Parliament. We would be happy to rise to the occasion and discuss with the European Council how to put in place a genuine structure of dialogue on this appointment.
Even before the Lisbon Treaty, the Council has been changing. It has experienced greater difficulty in adjusting to enlargement than either the Commission or the Parliament. A Council with 27 national representatives around a table is very different to one with 15 or 12 member states. The logic of the way the Council operates is being tested to the limit. The Parliament, by contrast, has adjusted quite well. We still have seven political groups, it is just that each of them is somewhat larger.
I believe that the opportunity exists, with the Lisbon Treaty, to build closer and more effective cooperation between the Council and the Parliament, in a spirit of genuine cooperation and mutual respect, but based on the new equality of our positions.
xxx Reform of the European Parliament xxx
To prepare the ground for a challenging future, one of my first acts as President of the Parliament was to get agreement from the leaders of the political groups to institute a serious and comprehensive internal reform process within the Parliament, designed to update and improve our procedures at every level.
The reform agenda was based on a detailed mandate extended to a Working Party on Parliamentary Reform, chaired by my colleague Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, which at least once a month to identify specific improvements to our working practices.
In October, the Conference of Presidents (of political groups), which I chair, agreed an ambitious package of changes to the structure of plenary business. This divides the monthly session in Strasbourg into clearer slots or ‘priority debates’, with key legislative business on Tuesdays and major announcements by the Commission and reporting by Council on Wednesday. It introduces topical debates on Wednesday afternoons, brings debates and votes closer together, upgrades the importance of the rapporteur in debates on legislative proposals, and allows more spontaneous interventions from the floor (on the basis of catching the President’s eye).
The Working Party has made parallel recommendations, adopted by the Conference of Presidents in December, on streamlining the process of ‘own-initiative’ reports. We want to use these reports to focus more on the big policy issues, engage in a dialogue with the Commission before legislative proposals are issued, and then follow up to ensure that implementation and enforcement take place properly in the member states once laws are passed.
The Working Party is now working on Better Law-Making issues, such as legislative planning, impact assessments, comitology, simplification and soft law. Our view in the Parliament is that we are not simply a machine for generating amendments to draft legislation: we have a responsibility to the citizen to help ensure good law from its inception to implementation, from upstream to downstream in the legislative process.
xxx Conclusion xxx
I hope that in those few remarks, I have given you a sense of some of the institutional questions we are grappling with in the European Parliament at the moment - and some of the perspectives opening up as a result of the new Lisbon Treaty.
I hope that these thoughts might also provide a framework for our discussion now on the Parliament’s role and potential. I would be particularly interested to hear your own insights and reflections on how the EU institutions are evolving and lessons to be learned from the US experience over almost two and a half centuries.
As you can tell, this is a very exciting time, especially for someone like myself, who is seeing so much of what I and many colleagues worked for, over many decades, finally come to fruition. It is truly a pleasure to be able to share with you my thinking on this important topic tonight.