Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.
Even in death, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing can still exert influence over the European Union. The former French president has died at just the moment when the members of the European Council — a body that he could justly claim to have invented in 1974 — are about to set in motion a Conference on the Future of Europe.
The echoes from history are deafening: Giscard d’Estaing himself presided over a Convention on the Future of Europe from 2002 to 2003. His death is an uncomfortable but timely reminder not to repeat the mistakes that were made when that one was set up. Above all, it is a warning not to give the chairmanship of the conference to Guy Verhofstadt, a liberal member of the European Parliament who has been lobbying for the position and is the Parliament’s candidate for the post.
Ironically, back in December 2001, Verhofstadt, who was then the prime minister of Belgium, played a big part in the Council’s flawed decision to designate Giscard d’Estaing as president of the convention.
Not that Verhofstadt would characterize the choice of Giscard d’Estaing as flawed. Nor would he regret the fruits of the convention’s work: a draft EU “constitutional treaty” whose pretentious ambition crumbled in the face of hard reality in the space of four days in mid-2005 when it was rejected by referendums in France and the Netherlands.
Although many of the changes to the EU’s decision-making rules were subsequently introduced by the Lisbon treaty, which took effect in 2009, the aspiration to an EU constitution was dropped — though some may hope to resurrect it.
Verhofstadt has long argued the need for a European constitution, made comparisons with the creation of the United States of America, and urged EU member countries towards a United States of Europe.
This week he mourned the passing of Giscard d’Estaing with a message on social media: “May his commitment and the energy he so ably demonstrated on the convention guide us in our work in the Conference on the Future of Europe.”
Verhofstadt has made no secret of his desire to play a leading role in the proposed conference, which is an initiative jointly proposed by the European Parliament and the European Commission a year ago that has the support of the French and German governments. It is supposed to encourage public debate about how the policies and institutions of the EU might develop. But some in the European Council are opposed to his being chair.
Verhofstadt’s declaration
Giscard d’Estaing was undoubtedly a substantial figure in Europe’s post-1945 history. As president of France from 1974 to 1981, he grappled with two of the biggest issues of late 20th century geo-politics: Europe’s response to the oil shock of 1973 and NATO’s response to the threat of nuclear attack from an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union. In both endeavors, Helmut Schmidt, the chancellor of West Germany, was a close ally.
But history will probably be less kind about Giscard d’Estaing’s role in the institutional politics of the EU at the start of the 21st century and, for that matter, about Verhofstadt, who gave him that role.
Before the advent of the Lisbon treaty, chairing the Council and meetings of the Council of Ministers was a task that rotated between the national governments, with each taking a turn for six months. In the second half of 2001, the task fell to Belgium, where Verhofstadt was prime minister.
He was keen to take up the issue of institutional reform of the EU, dissatisfied with the changes made in December 2001 in preparation for the expansion of the EU to Central and Eastern Europe (10 states were added to the existing 15 in May 2004 and another two in January 2007), which he regarded as inadequate.
He drafted what became the Declaration of Laeken — the Council’s agreement to embark on the convention and further treaty reform — which was agreed by the Council at the Royal Palace of Laeken and billed as the crowning achievement of Belgium’s EU presidency.
Accompanying the Laeken Declaration was an agreement that Giscard d’Estaing would chair the convention. The choice was buttressed by the nomination as deputy chairmen of a former prime minister of Italy, Giuliano Amato, from the center-left, and a former prime minister of Belgium, Jean-Luc Dehaene, from the center-right.
Immodest ambition
Even at the time, there was a dissonance between the declaration’s ambition “to bring citizens, and primarily the young, closer to the European design and the European institutions” and the choice of Giscard d’Estaing, who was then 75 years old, as the embodiment of this ambition.
Those inside the European bubble believed that the former French president’s stature would give the Convention credibility and status. They paid less attention to Giscard d’Estaing’s perennial inability to shake off the image of being remote and condescending — which arguably had prevented him from prolonging or reviving his political career in France.
What compounded the error was that Giscard d’Estaing was an able and skillful chairman and was committed to expanding the influence of the EU.
He had pushed through the creation of the Council in 1974 to formalize summits of national leaders, partly by an adept change of nomenclature. So, a quarter of a century later, he did not shrink from renaming the Convention on the Future of Europe as the European Convention, nor from describing it as drafting a constitution for the EU.
In 1978, he had with Schmidt laid the foundations of the European Monetary System: So, he would not shrink from institutional innovation, particularly building up the power of the European Parliament, of which he had been a member from 1989 to 1993.
The draft constitutional treaty that emerged from the convention was not modest in its ambition. Giscard d’Estaing himself drafted the preamble to the constitution, complete with a quote from Thucydides.
Top-down
All of this left the outcome of the convention vulnerable to the charge that it was a top-down project being imposed on the people of France (or the Netherlands, or Austria…) by a European elite.
The optics were bad. And when the political weather changed — because of the Iraq war and because the enlargement of the EU in 2004 ushered in an unsettling period of intra-EU migration as Eastern Europeans moved west in search of work — then the referendums on the constitutional treaty became an obvious target for expressing discontent.
The institutional chaos that followed the rejection of the constitutional treaty dragged on until the Lisbon treaty entered into force in December 2009. By then, the EU was grappling with a global banking crisis, which was soon followed by a sovereign debt crisis. The warm glow that the EU had felt after its 2004 enlargement dissipated quickly: In retrospect, 2004-05 looks like a high point for EU self-confidence and a missed opportunity.
When historians of the EU come to look at the what-ifs and the might-have-beens of that first decade of the 21st century, it will be hard to disentangle the effects of the Iraq War and the interplay with national politics.
Nevertheless, it will still be worth asking whether the European Union’s evolution would have been different if the Declaration of Laeken had been more modestly drafted and Verhofstadt had not pressed for Giscard d’Estaing to be appointed to lead the European Convention.
Two decades on, the Conference on the Future of Europe starts off with more modest ambitions, circumscribed by tensions between the Parliament and the Council, between Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. If this time round there is no Giscard d’Estaing — and no Verhofstadt — that may be no bad thing.