Although there still remains the signing of the Lisbon Treaty by the President of Poland (reported to be set for today) and that by the President of the Czech Republic, it would seem that the Lisbon Treaty will become effective across the EU as from 1 January, 2010.
MEUSAC yesterday held a public conference at the Westin Dragonara not just to celebrate the Yes victory at the Irish referendum but also to ask what comes next.
There was a certain amount of celebratory mood, and, especially towards the end of the conference, people kept mentioning Malta’s sixth seat in the European Parliament as if this was the only result of the Irish vote.
Many glossed over the fact that the Irish only got it right at the second attempt, just as they had done on the Nice Treaty, and only after being beaten down by the worst recession in history, and after getting a raft of concessions. Or that the French and the Dutch, who had equally voted against the Constitution, had not been asked to take a second vote. No one even thought of mentioning those countries, such as Malta, where the Lisbon Treaty was ratified in Parliament without even a vote being physically taken.
The Lisbon Treaty, however, includes more than just Malta’s sixth seat at the EP. It will also lead to a loss of some of Malta’s veto powers in the Council. Foreign Minister Tonio Borg said Malta had only used the veto once in these five years, on ship registration. Malta will still be able to use the veto on such issues as taxation, neutrality and foreign policy, but Malta, he pledged, will always be ‘responsible’.
The European Parliament will be made stronger, which is to the benefit of the small nations who will not be so strong within the Council with its new qualified majority rules.
The Treaty also states that a petition by over one million signatures from across the EU will be enough to force the Commission to reconsider an issue.
Dr Borg announced that at the next Budget, the national Parliament will be strengthened so that it can cope with the expected flow of proposals for EU legislation sent over for national scrutiny.
One other item in the Treaty is the Fundamental Human Rights Charter which will now become basic law in the EU.
The approval of the treaty opens the way for the next wave of enlargement. Dr Borg said the government has always believed there should be no numerus clausus in the EU. Countries which satisfy the entry qualifications will be eligible for membership. This would include Turkey but even before that it could include Croatia and Iceland. Montenegro has already applied and soon Serbia, while all opposition to Macedonia’s inclusion seems to have died down.
Richard Crowe, an Irishman, legal adviser at the European Court of Auditors, gave a detailed presentation of what he called the upgrading of the EU from Windows 2001 to Windows 2009. He pointed at three still unknown challenges: How will the President of the European Council, the High Representative and the Commission President relate to each other? How will the new Council voting system work in practice and who will it benefit? Will the mechanisms to involve national parliaments prove to be effective?
It will only be after the system begins to operate that any eventual flaws are identified.
In his presentation, Dr Borg had referred to the equally lengthy and tortuous way in which the American states had come together to create the Union: even there the process of integration worked slowly.
Dr Borg had left by the time the new American ambassador arrived, so he missed a masterful explanation of the US process. Douglas Kmiec, who made it clear he was speaking on a personal level, hinted the EU could say it was more fortunate. At the Philadelphia Convention in 1789, 55 people were locked together in a building in the height of summer and told they could not be let out unless they came up with a constitution.
Even so, the line between what was left to the individual states and what became the national government’s area of competence, remained for many years a very thin and fragile line, a pliable border, even to this very day.
Mr Kmiec, law professor that he is, ended by asking a somewhat ambiguous question: does the EU Charter of Human Rights acknowledge a higher authority than itself?
He also made another equally cryptic remark when, in his official capacity as Ambassador, and after congratulating President Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize (he won the prize before he won the peace, he said) he referred to the closing down of the Guantanamo camp. The process now ongoing is that of sending the inmates home, but in some cases their own countries do not want them back, Mr Kmiec said. Some countries in the EU are taking some of these: some openly declare it and some don’t. To both, and without referring to Malta in particular, Mr Kmiec expressed his government’s thanks.
Mr Kmiec also congratulated Malta for being an example to the US in the way it regulated its financial sector. Malta has shown, he said, that if you have standards of value and not merely insure against insurance, you can conduct economic activity in an ordinary way without thereby imperilling the world’s economy and even your own.
A panel of two MEPs, three MPs and the undersigned discussed how Malta’s six seats in the EP could be utilised better, agreeing that the national Parliament needs further resources to be able to do its job of scrutinising the proposed EU legislation better.
Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, who concluded the conference, said that unless a person ‘who lives in St Catherine Street, Zurrieq’ could understand what was going on, the EU and its processes will remain a mystery and an unknown to many. With a sixth seat, the Maltese citizens are the most over-represented people in the EU. But when battling for this sixth seat, Malta was paving the way too for Iceland, which has fewer inhabitants. Now that the internal restructuring of the EU is over, we can all turn to the issues that really matter - growth and a way out of the recession especially.