European Union leaders will on Thursday lock horns over whether to fix a deadline to revive parts of the club’s half-dead constitution, and over the pace of the union’s expansion to the east.
Wolfgang Schüssel, Austria’s chancellor and host of this week’s EU summit in Brussels, wants the union to draw a line under its constitutional trauma by 2009 at the latest. He believes the union must urgently update its creaking institutions and agree changes such as a new EU president, foreign minister, simplified voting system and a charter of fundamental rights.
But a number of countries oppose tying the union to a firm timetable, and believe citizens will not understand why there is such a rush to revive large parts of a text rejected last year by French and Dutch voters.
Germany, which would benefit most from a new voting system directly linked to the population of each member state, wants to accelerate the process, but Britain and France are among those trying to apply the brakes.
“It’s very difficult to find a formulation of words to produce a result in 2009,” said one French official. President Jacques Chirac of France and Tony Blair, UK premier, agreed last week to back an extended “period of reflection” on the treaty.
Meanwhile Mr Schüssel will also press leaders during the two-day summit to agree tough new language that could slow the pace of future enlargement of the 25-member club.
The Austrian chancellor, who leads a country with serious reservations about Turkish EU membership, wants to make it clear an applicant country could only join if the club was ready to “absorb” it.
The debate is likely to descend into a classic EU dispute about words. Sceptics about Turkish accession such as Mr Schüssel and Angela Merkel, German chancellor, want the language on the EU’s “absorption capacity” to be as strong as possible.
Others like Britain, supported by the European Commission, believe turning this into a new criterion – over which applicant members would have no control – would create an unfair new barrier to entry. They would prefer the absorption capacity to be seen as simply a factor to be “taken into consideration”.
The argument concerns mainly big potential members, for which one should read Turkey – whose move towards membership will be long and painful – and Ukraine, whose aspirations to join the union have not been recognised by the EU. Although Mr Schüssel is working to defuse potential problems at the summit, other flashpoints could arise:
■Lithuania, backed by a number of new member states, feels it has been treated harshly by western European countries in being refused entry to the eurozone, heightening tensions between east and west.
■Josep Borrell, European parliament president, will urge EU leaders to end the parliament’s forced monthly commute between Brussels and Strasbourg. Travelling between the two seats is estimated to cost €200m ($252m, £137m) a year, but Mr Chirac will stamp on any attempt to end the arrangement.
■Britain has resisted attempts to make lawmaking in the EU’s Council of Ministers more transparent, in a U-turn described as “astonishing” by ambassadors who recall how the UK championed the issue during its presidency last year.
Economic issues will take a back seat at the summit, although heads of government will discuss the latest draft of an EU energy strategy, which sets out terms for better reciprocal relations between the bloc and Russia. The Finnish EU presidency, starting in July, will prioritise the issue.
The Austrian presidency’s main message will be that the union should focus on delivering results and working better under existing rules, while aiming to resolve institutional questions in the next three years.
