How Much Time Will It Take?
Description
This article is from the European Union FAQ, by Roland Siebelink & Bart Schelfhout with numerous contributions by others.
How Much Time Will It Take?
The Report does not explicitly state which Member States have
expressed
which opinions, but speaks in unexplicit terms such as +Many of us;, +Some
of us; and +One of us;. It can only be derived from the current home and
European politics of the different Member State governments who share the
minority and majority opinions in the different issues.
Still many commentators have hinted that +One of us; is more often than not
the British Government of John Major, that is widely believed to be held
hostage by radical Eurosceptics in the Westminster parliament. If only for
that political reality (and thus ignoring the fact that so far all IGC's
have always taken more than a year) the 1996 IGC is believed to continue
into 1997, at least until the British Government has been re-elected or
replaced--with both outcomes likely to vastly increase the manouvering space
for the British negotiators.
Even if the IGC is finished in 1997, all proposed Treaty changes must still
be approved by all Member States in accordance with their respective
constitutional procedures (always involving the assent of the national
parliament(s), sometimes with the addition of a national referendum among
the people at large).
Personal note: you will notice that in all EU institutions, there is an
asymmetry between the number of inhabitants of member states and the number
of representatives they have in the various institutions (e.g. one
Commissioner for 300,000 Luxemburgers compared to two for 80 million
Germans). This is a compromise between the supranational principle of
one-inhabitant-one-vote and the intergovernmental principle of
one-government-one-vote, and thus an illustration of the general ambiguity
between supranational and intergovernmental principles that so characterizes
the European Union.
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