This article first appeared in the Lib Dem European Group Newsletter in March 2002.

The Convention which opened in Brussels on 28 February is the most exciting opportunity for a generation to reform the European Union, and to turn it into an organisation which can tackle the real concerns of Europe’s citizens, and stop interfering in all sorts of silly little things which it shouldn’t. Liberal Democrats can be proud too that we supported the Convention’s creation – less than a year ago the Government was still insisting that there was absolutely no way they would allow any such body to be set up.

The Convention will meet in public and will be open to any European citizen who wants to contribute to what it is doing. It has, if not quite a blank sheet of paper to start with, then a very broad remit to reform the governance of our continent. The fifteen governments’ excellent declaration at the Laeken summit in December which set up the Convention asked, for example sixty-two questions about the future of Europe which it hopes the Convention will start to answer.

Liberal Democrats should welcome this opportunity, and engage in it fully. One of the advantages of our positive stance on Europe is that we can be frank about what is wrong with the EU, and how it should reform. Now is the time to use that advantage and to make a positive contribution to this crucial debate.

We should welcome the fact of the Convention itself, moving away from what has now become the ‘traditional’ way of deciding these things, of Prime Ministers holing up in some European resort for three days and nights to come up with some deal that is incomprehensible to anyone outside, and in the case of Nice, incomprehensible even to those on the inside. Clearly this is a much more sensible process. But its outcome will still go to a traditional Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) for final decision due in December next year, which could potentially reject any proposal which, after all its work, the representative Convention came up with. But obviously this could be difficult to justify, and so the British Government secured at Laeken two further insurance policies, just in case it did produce something unacceptable to them. Firstly, they insisted on at least a six-month ‘cooling-off’ period between the end of the Convention and the IGC, to dull the memory, and put its spinners to work. And secondly they secured the appointment of a British diplomat, Sir John Kerr, as Secretary-General of the Convention, usefully placed to prevent it coming up with anything that wouldn’t go down too well in Downing Street.

This, they hope, will be enough to head off the danger of some dodgy foreigners coming up with some wild plan. But Blair also has some positive plans for the Convention, which the Government’s one licensed Euro-enthusiast, Peter Hain, and Jack Straw, have been beginning to explain. New Labour has no time at all for European institutions, and is determined to ensure that real power remains, and indeed flows back to, national Governments. In the European context this means strengthening the power of the European Council, and Council of Ministers, and the FCO is putting forward a plan to reduce the rather unwieldy number of different formations of the Council which currently exist down to a few. Each of these Councils would then elect their own President, to chair these meetings for a rather longer period than the current rotating six months (two and a half years, say). These Chairs would then come together in a super-Council which would have some sort of overall co-ordination role, operating as a sort of sub-European Council. This super-Council will obviously have to have a super-President (working title ‘the Tony Blair job’).

If they can manage to persuade all their European cousins to sign up to all this, they think, they will not only have ‘streamlined’ the operation of the existing European institutions, but also win an important ‘battle’ over the future of Europe for Britain, which they can take back to the British people, as a sign of how Britain can win in Europe, and need not always only be pushed around by it. Given this reassurance, the British people will then trust Europe enough, so the argument runs, to sign up to the Euro as well. There is suspicion too that he hopes Sweden – where public opinion about the euro is now increasingly positive – will hold a referendum too, further helping to bounce the British people into voting ‘yes’.

Liberal Democrats should be wary of these ideas. Improving the workings of the system is obviously very welcome, but national Ministers necessarily have their own individual and political interests to pursue. In those areas where we have decided that we should make a decision at European level, we should not give the most important role to people primarily interested in getting one over on all the other participants, and being able to present it as a success to their own national press corps. Such a system, in which the decision-making body is split up into different factions representing different groups, seems almost designed to promote internal conflict. We often hear at European Council summits that ‘Britain’ disagreed with ‘Germany’ over some issue, while ‘Belgium’, say, has come up with some nifty new way of approaching it. This is of course no such thing. The average man in the street in Stockport has no argument with the man in the street in, say, Baden-Baden. What it means, of course, is that the British Government has a quarrel with the German Government. In a democracy if voters are being offered a particular sort of action at European level, they should be able to vote, clearly and transparently for that policy at European level _ as clearly as if you want a particular policy followed by your local Council, you vote for a particular party in local elections.

So the central role in the development of European policy should be for the European elections held every five years, and the institution which results from them, the European Parliament. The Convention should give the European Parliament the key role in controlling Government at a European level, while finding an auxiliary role for recognising the national sensibilities of individual countries through the Council.

The Convention should also produce a proposal for a European Constitution. In his speech in the Hague, which contained some surprisingly pro-European language on elements such as extension of QMV, even Jack Straw seemed to accept this. Such a document – long Lib Dem policy – would set out clearly what each level of government in Europe should do, and what they should not do. One of the major causes of so much suspicion about Europe is the feeling that it just increasingly takes on responsibility for everything – ‘euro-creep’ – and we should be clearer than this about what we want. We should set out clearly what we want ‘Europe’ to do, what we don’t want it to do, and not be afraid too to pass back powers to national or regional level when it is more appropriately exercised there.

But we should also be prepared to give powers to the European level where this is clearly in the interests of citizens. September 11th was just the latest reminder that what is a question of security and defence for one of our countries, is a question for all of our countries. The repeated sight through the 1990’s of war on Europe’s own doorstep, but Europe incapable of acting together was a dreadful indictment of our in ability to organise ourselves. And it is increasingly clear that in future the USA will not be willing to bail Europe out of such failings. As Defending Democracy, the policy paper going to Conference in Manchester reminds us, Europe spends around half of what America does on defence, and for its bucks gets far less in the way of military capacity. Europe needs both to stop wasting precious resources on facilities which duplicate each other – often completely unnecessarily – and through its unity start projecting some of the authority on the world stage which it deserves, and which it owes as a duty to other parts of the world. The Convention should produce proposals for much closer working at European level on defence and security issues. This is of course completely compatible with individual member states retaining an ability to intervene in other parts of the world, for example in former colonial areas, where they have a particular interest.

The Convention will have to face too the difficult question of the possible emergence of a ‘federal’ or ‘hard core’ of countries, or what the British press call ‘a two-speed Europe’. It is clear that some member states are willing to move further and faster ahead in integration than others, and some in the Convention will be pushing for a small group of countries to go ahead and forge much closer integration than countries such as the UK will agree to. Only by such a ‘pioneer group’, they say, was the EEC created in the first place, or has it made such significant leaps forward in its history as the Euro or Schengen.

But the idea of the founding six going ahead regardless of the rest of the EU, and moving still further off into the distance from the accession countries, is not attractive. It mistakes a false aim of particular institutional model of integration, for the real importance of the European Union, which is working together to promote Europe-wide peace and prosperity. But it is clear too that in what is soon to be a Union of twenty-five or more countries, we are going to have to get used to the idea that not every country can have a veto over the decisions of the Union as a whole. The Convention, and the IGC which will follow it, will have to come up with a balance between achieving most of Europe moving together, and not being hamstrung by just one or two countries.

This Convention is an long-overdue opportunity. For the first time an inclusive forum, made up of all the players in Europe on the future of the continent – national Governments, Members of the European Parliament, and Members of national Parliaments – are coming together to discuss shaping a future constitutional form for the governance of our continent. Liberal Democrats should seize this exciting opportunity eagerly.