A reasonably reliable source has given me some tips on outcomes expected from the current summit in Brussels:

* They will reach an agreement on the draft of the constitution. The European Parliament will have even more members, and the rules on qualified majorities will be sorted out.

* They will not agree on a successor to Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission. That decision will be put off until the third week of July.

It is not just my personal experience that many people’s opinions about the EU and its institutions are predominantly based on a political chicken and egg problem: No one knows what came first, ignorance or lack of interest; however, both do a great job in reinforcing each other.

A particularly eye-opening experience for me was the change of hearts of a conservative friend who is now a lonely Europhile in the Tory party. Only a couple of days of un-biased research for a paper about the EU and much of the previous Superstate rethoric had to become intellectually dishonest. Sure, institutional Europe does feature a certain, and often bemoaned “democratic deficit”. But more importantly, I’d say, Europe lacks citizens appreciating the importance of the democratic procedures already in place.

But this, I suggest, is much less the people’s fault than now suggested by the same media that usually avoids explaining the complexity and importance of European governance for our life; a little because many journalists have a hard time with complexity themselves, but more importantly, because the technocratic and rather invisible way politcs is done in Brussels – while appreciated by national politicians – does not make good tv.
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Elections to the European Parliament is tomorrow for some of you, the 13th for most of us. What party do you plan to vote for? (Will you vote?) Why?

This wouldn’t be the first time. Now, however, it’s not milk or potatoes that are at issue, but words.

An acute difficulty of excess verbiage has lead Neil kinnock to crack down and order that in future no Commission report should be more than 15 pages long, except in undefined rare circumstances. This compares with the present average of length of 32.

The reason for this change unfortunately is not the arrival of sound sense, but rather that of 10 new members.

“Officials at the European Commission produce a mountain of jargon-laden reports every year, some of them incomprehensible in any language.”

I’m not sure if verbal apoplexy is a fatal condition, or merely chronic: I shall have to check.

It had already been assumed that the European Commission and the Council of Ministers would go ahead with the EU-US airline data (PNR) transfer agreement (.pdf) despite the European Parliament’s decisison to wait for a Court of Justice ruling. But now Edward Hasbrouck has it in writing: according to a US Department of Homeland Security transcript of a joint press conference with US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, European Commissioner of Justice and Home Affairs, Antonio Vitorino apparently answered to the question whether he knew how to proceed if the court decision would (as expected) deem the EU-US agreement in violation of EU data protection regulations (and possibly in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights) -

“Well, first of all, I would like to clarify that the conclusion of this process has not yet been done. And this week, the Commission will take a decision on Wednesday. And next Monday, the Council of Ministers will take the final decision. I don’t want to anticipate those decisions, but likely those decisions will be in favor in the sense to go ahead with the adequacy finding statement and with the international agreement. That will most likely change the nature of the case, the court case, that has been raised by the Parliament. But I see no obstacles for the proceedings, according to what has been agreed, until the court takes a position in some time.”

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The race to become the next President of the European Commission got interesting yesterday.

Well, maybe not that interesting, but the announcement by European Parliament President Pat Cox that he would not be seeking re-election as an Irish MEP in June is widely agreed to be a signal that he’s interested in the other Presidency.

As this Independent article discusses, Cox doesn’t appear to be any government’s first choice for the job, though that could be a benefit rather than a hindrance as first choices often fall at the first hurdle in the horse-trading that determines who’ll get the Presidency.

(An interesting sidebar to the discussion is that the UK may block Jacques Chirac’s preferred choice – Belgian PM Verhofstadt – allowing the Daily Express to recycle it’s ‘Britain Blocks The Belgian’ headline from when John Major vetoed Jean-Luc Dehaene in 1994)

But, the most interesting part of these negotiations is that the results of next month’s European Parliament elections could have a decisive effect on who’s up for the job and who’s not. If the EPP and ELDR have a combined majority in the Parliament they may be able to insist on the appointment of Cox as Commission President which, I think, may be one of the more interesting developments in EU politics of recent times, in that it’ll mean the Commission has a President who owes his job as much to the Parliament (of which he is a 15-year veteran) as he does the member governments.

Sit back and watch – this could get interesting.

Bridging what is left of the Iron Curtain will not be easy. But that is always the case when great things are at stake. That – not tonight’s celebrations – is what Europeans, old and new, East and West, should remember when the road gets a little bumpy along the way.

Only a few minutes ago, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, and Lituania became members of the European Union! Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Malta will follow within the hour.

But as I have decided to celebrate the enlargement offline with some friends and a bottle of champagne I once lost to a Polish friend by insisting that 2004 would be too early for Polish membership, I will now act against my German instincts and welcome the remaining new-members-to-be about 30 minutes early – willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!

More on the British referendum, here’s Johann Hari’s clarion call for pro-Europe Brits to finally stand up and fight. The money quote:

This is a European country, and we must not allow a lying Australian-American billionaire and his paid lackeys to poison our sense of our own national interest.

Indeed. A minor quibble, however, with this statement:

No other major European political party – except for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Front in France – supports the Tory position of not having a constitution at all.

This is debatable. Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president and the figurehead leader of the most popular Czech political party, ODS, has gone on record saying saying he hoped the proposed EU constitution would be rejected. Not amended, mind you — rejected. Whether he wants a constitution at all, I suppose, would depend on what you mean by “constitution.”
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No this isn’t a linguistic point about the plural form in English. According to Wikipedia at any rate both forms (referendums and referenda) are acceptable (but I did feel the need to check). The issue here is rather whether the referendum is a singularly British obsesssion, something which in the French context is lacking in real significance. This, at least, would seem to be the conclusion you could reach if you went by Alain Jupp?’s latest pronouncements on the matter:

European countries should think carefully before copying Mr Blair’s “rather personal, and perhaps I should add, ultimately British, initiative”.

“When it comes to choosing [between ratification by vote in parliament and a referendum], we would like to take a concerted approach with our partners and in particular with Germany,” Mr Jupp? said at a press conference.

And this despite, of course, the fact that Jacques Chirac delared in Thessaloniki last year that he was “logically in favour of a referendum” since “It would be the only legitimate way”.

In my schooldays we were taught that referenda were a very un-British thing. That their existence in the constitution of the Fifth Republic was one of the weaknesses of the French way of doing politics. That they could lead to demagogic manipulation depending on how the question was framed. My oh my, how things have changed!

The British sovereignists are the most fervent advocates of this most ‘un-British’ of institutions, while the home of referenda finds the present suggestion an ‘ultimately British’ initiative.

I suppose the definitive, long-standing objection to the referenda system has to be the leeway it provides for all that jiggery-pockery we are currently seeing.

As the FT observes:

“Mr Chirac’s decision will hinge on his estimation of whether the Socialist opposition would seek to trip the government up in a referendum either by calling for a No vote or by encouraging voters to see it as a protest vote against an unpopular administration.”

Principles, above all principles.