The directly elected EP and the making of the Draft Treaty on European Union Spinelli was, three decades after his initiative for creating a European...

The directly elected EP and the making of the Draft Treaty on European Union
Spinelli was, three decades after his initiative for creating a European Political Community (EPC) in the early 1950s, once again at the centre of a major endeavour to federate Europe. But this time the Monnet method of building federal Europe by a series of steps had provided him with a directly elected Parliament to act as a constituent, and, aged seventy five, he now had not only an idea for achieving it in the form of a treaty to establish a federal European Union but also a capacity for leadership through persuasion as well as example; and, in order to get the Parliament's structures and party groups on board for the voyage, he realised that he should begin by securing the commitment of a sufficient core of individual MEPs to the idea.

He opened his campaign in May 1980 in a debate on the budget, when he judged that their treatment by the Council had irritated MEPs sufficiently, by declaring that the Council's behaviour regarding the budget was such that the Parliament must initiate reform of the institutions: if this was to be done by the governments ignoring the Parliament, the result would be an intergovernmental reform that would change nothing; if by Parliament, it would deliver stronger, supranational institutions capable of dealing with the problems. He followed this with a letter to all MEPs and an invitation to a dinner at the Restaurant Crocodile, which was attended only by three other Italians, three British and two Germans, who did however found the Crocodile Club to promote the idea. Membership grew, regular weekly meetings were held and by the end of the year some eighty had expressed interest. A resolution was drafted for MEPs to sign, proposing an ad hoc working party representing all political groups and currents of opinion, to devote itself to the task of drawing up a constitution to present to the member states; and by June there were a hundred and seventy nine signatures, from all the significant party groups. But the largest group, the Christian Democrats, was under-represented, evidently because, having been prominent in the Parliament's federalist initiatives, they saw Spinelli as an interloper: In discussion with them, however, Spinelli discovered that they would be satisfied if the resolution proposed a full parliamentary committee rather than a less formal working group, which he was ready to concede - and which was surely an important improvement.

The Parliament approved the resolution and the Committee on Institutional Affairs started work in January 1982, with a strong membership, balanced among the party groups and including three chairs from other committees. Spinelli wished to emphasise broad support rather than over-identification with himself. So chapters on the several aspects were drafted by six co-rapporteurs from the different party groups, within the framework of a basic general draft provided by himself as general rapporteur, underlining the principles of democratic and effective institutions and of competences attributed according to the principle of subsidiarity. The Committee repeatedly discussed and revised all the reports, until a full draft report was collated and edited by Spinelli, and it was debated, amended and approved by a large majority in the Committee. This vast task was completed and presented to plenary session, which, after discussing 185 amendments and adopting a few of them, approved the resolution in September 1983 by 202 votes to 37.

Four lawyers then worked with Spinelli on drafting a legal text, which included Article 82 stipulating that the Treaty could enter into effect when ratified by over half the member-states containing two-thirds of the Community's population. That was of course designed to prevent the whole enterprise from being torpedoed, like the EPC in 1954, by the veto of one or two member states. Knowing that this would be controversial, Spinelli had kept it until this stage so that MEPs could both appreciate the importance of the project and be confident that its implementation was legally well enough founded. That strategy was vindicated on 14 February 1984 when the plenary approved the legal text by the yet larger majority of 237 to 32.

The Parliament's Draft Treaty
Apart from Article 82, by-passing the veto on treaty amendment, the various provisions of the Draft Treaty establishing the European Union did not break with the method of building on the foundations of the European Community. Indeed many of the provisions have been put into effect in subsequent amending treaties. The distinction was, rather, in the scale of what was proposed, designed as a radically new departure to create a more powerful, democratic and effective Union.

Thus the European Union would inherit all the laws, practices and institutions of the European Community that were compatible with the new Treaty. The European Council would decide its own working methods and a new function would be to nominate the President of the Commission, who would select the list of other Commissioners to be presented for approval by the Parliament. The Council would decide mainly under the procedure of qualified majority and in legislative codecision with the Parliament. The Commission would be strengthened and the Court of Justice aided by a Court of First Instance. The division of powers between Union and member states would follow the principle of subsidiarity. There would be a monetary union and timetable for completion of the internal market; and the provision for environmental and social policies would be more explicit. The distinction between agricultural and other expenditure would be abolished and the Union would have power to raise its 'own resources'. These provisions were all in the line of the Community's federal development. But cooperation in defence and political aspects of foreign policy was to be the responsibility of the European Council, which was to determine its own procedures, i.e. to work on a basis of consensus until it should decide otherwise.

Spinelli had carefully planned the next steps, towards winning enough support to ensure ratification of the Draft Treaty. The Parliament secured backing from the European associations of employers and trade unions as well from other elements of civil society. The Treaty was presented to member states' parliaments, was generally well received and was approved as it stood by the Belgian and Italian parliaments. But the breakthrough came when, two months after the European Parliament had approved the Treaty, Spinelli together with the President of the Parliament, Piet Dankert, and of the Institutional Committee, Mauro Ferri, visited President Mitterrand. Spinelli believed that French leadership would be the key to success. So he outlined the unique role that France, and hence Mitterrand himself, could play in launching the process of ratification and he proposed that Mitterrand should make a statement to that effect in his speech to Parliament in May 1984 as the current President of the European Council. Mitterrand was evidently impressed by what Spinelli said because he ended that speech by expressing his support for the Draft Treaty, adding that 'France is available for such an enterprise'; that he, as President, was willing, on behalf of France, 'to examine and defend your project, the inspiration behind which it approves; and, implicitly accepting the by-passing of the veto through Article 82, that consultations should begin leading up to a conference 'of the member states concerned'.

Meanwhile Parliament's delegation had visited Bonn, where Spinelli found parties and members of the Bundestag largely supportive. But the reaction of the Chancellor's office was that the time was not yet ripe to consider alternatives to all the member states going forward together, with particular mention of the occupying powers, i.e. the UK as well as France. The preference for steps taken by all member states was a settled element in Germany's European policy; and it may well be that the political situation in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev was to succeed to the leadership in a year's time, weighed heavily with Chancellor Kohl, who had long combined what seemed to many to be, for his generation, the contradictory ambitions of achieving both European and German unification - the latter requiring the consent of all four occupying powers.

Mitterrand then secured the agreement of the European Council in June to set up an Ad Hoc Committee of the heads of governments' personal representatives, which became known as the Dooge Committee after the Irish Senator who chaired it, to prepare the ground for the proposed conference; and Mitterrand appointed as his own representative Maurice Faure, who had been one of the signatories of the Rome Treaties and could be relied on to draft a report for the Committee incorporating the main features of the Draft Treaty. This he indeed did in the Committee's Interim Report, presented to the European Council in December 1984, with the reservations of the British, Danish and Greek members expressed in numerous dissenting footnotes.

Spinelli had by now identified Germany as the 'weak point' among the states whose support for the Draft Treaty was necessary; and Kohl proposed postponement of the decision on the Committee's final report, with presentation only to the foreign ministers in March and to the European Council not until June. Spinelli perceived that this delay was a danger for the Draft Treaty.

From Draft Treaty to Single European Act
The destiny of the Draft Treaty had indeed been profoundly affected by another decision of the European Council under Mitterrand's Presidency: to appoint Jacques Delors as President of the Commission starting in January 1985. Delors was determined to get the Community moving again after two decades of relative stagnation but, like Monnet, he sought what he thought politically possible while being at the same time necessary, whereas Spinelli put all his effort into making his vision of the necessary possible. So Delors spent the latter part of 1984 visiting the heads of member states' governments to ascertain which they would accept among what he identified as four major necessary projects: monetary union, common defence policy, reform to make the institutions more effective and democratic, or completion of the internal market. Needless to say, the one that gained unanimous assent, including that of Mrs Thatcher, was the single market. So Delors began his Commission Presidency preparing, with great speed and energy, a very detailed White Paper on a programme for completing the internal market by 1992, for presentation to the European Council in 1985.

Spinelli was encouraged when Delors told him, in September 1984, that he was now convinced that institutions were decisive. But Delors was doubtless thinking of institutional reforms that would be required to make a project such as the single market effective, rather than those of the Draft Treaty as a whole; and this offered a way through Kohl's dilemma by providing for a significant reform which all the member states were likely to accept.

Delors had the advantage of a close relationship with Mitterrand, including recent service as finance minister in his government; and this, combined with the Presidency of the Commission, helped to give him privileged access to Kohl. So it was perhaps not surprising that before the meeting of the European Council in June, both Kohl and Mitterrand made it known that they favoured reforms such as a move towards qualified majority voting in the Council, increases in power for the Commission and the Parliament, and an extension of Community competences, corresponding to what was to be required for what became the Single European Act rather than the full Draft Treaty.

This evidence that Mitterrand had abandoned the Draft Treaty was extremely disturbing for Spinelli, who underwent a major cancer operation on 22 May which seriously weakened him throughout the summer and prevented him from travelling until October. Mrs Thatcher, who preferred trying to create the single market through a 'gentlemen's agreement' rather than treaty amendment, was against the proposal for an intergovernmental conference. But the Italian presidency called a vote, in which the six founder states plus Ireland prevailed over the negative votes of Britain, Denmark and Greece. While this was encouraging, the IGC was based on the Commission's White Paper and the Dooge Committee's report, not the Parliament's Draft Treaty. So the main institutional reforms incorporated in the Single European Act agreed by the European Council in December 1985 were confined to provision for qualified majority voting on single market legislation, a "cooperation" procedure that gave the Parliament a foot in the door to legislative power and an assent procedure for accession treaties and association agreements; and there were some new competences in fields such as the environment, social policy and a fund to support the Community's less-developed regions, together with a commitment to the aim of monetary union.

Spinelli's first journey after his operation was to Bonn, in early October, where he was well received at the Bundestag, which had however delayed delivering its report, recommending that the Draft Treaty be the basis for the government's position, until after the IGC had been completed - perhaps because the Christian Democrats wished to express their support for the more federalist project while not embarrassing Kohl before the day of decision on the Single Act in the European Council. Spinelli followed this with a visit to Brussels for lunch with Delors, who said that not only Britain but also France and Germany were now opposed to the Draft Treaty and that the Commission, more realistically than the Parliament, was seeking a compromise; and after the European Council's meeting, Delors told the Parliament that what had been agreed was not enough, but nevertheless a significant step.

The Single European Act was signed in February 1986. Spinelli tried, despite his failing health, to rally MEPs into promoting a campaign to secure support from a group of member states for giving the Parliament a constituent role after the next European elections. But MEPs no longer had the stomach for it. So he died on the twenty third of May, believing that the result of all his efforts had been 'only a miserable little mouse, which many suspect is a dead mouse'.

Spinelli's legacy
The legacy of the second great episode of Spinelli's European federal odyssey, from 1970 to 1986, was twofold. He put the idea of a European constitution back on the political map from which it had been deleted since the mid-1950s, and he made a major contribution to the relaunching of the process of the Community's federal development, after the stasis initiated by de Gaulle.

Delors, in his Mémoires, was to express himself as 'surprised and hurt' that Spinelli had criticised the Single European Act so severely, pointing out that, without the impact of the Draft Treaty, he would not have been able to insert so many 'factors of progress' in it. The SEA did indeed initiate a period of dynamism in the Community during which important federal elements of the Draft Treaty came into effect. The Act's apparently modest institutional reforms led on, through subsequent treaties, to the application of the principles of qualified majority voting and codecision for most legislative decisions; to nomination by the European Council of the Commission's President subject to approval by the Parliament; and to the establishment of the Court of First Instance. Subsidiarity became a basic principle for the division of responsibilities between the member states and what is now called, as in the Draft Treaty, the Union. The Single Act's commitment to 'the progressive realisation of economic and monetary union' was honoured by the creation of the euro and the European Central Bank, for which British and Danish vetoes were circumvented by what amounted to a specific application of the principle of Article 82; and there is now an Amsterdam Treaty provision for this precedent to be followed by member states wishing to go farther and faster towards a federal polity.

Ail this confirmed the constructive synergy of Monnet's and Spinelli's approaches to the building of a federal Europe. It had been Monnet's creation of the ECSC and initiation of the proposal for an EDC that gave Spinellithe opportunity to promote his project for a federal EPC; and from this in turn emerged the project of the common market for the relaunching of Monnet's Community process, with the successful extension of its scope in the EEC. It was thanks to the provision in the ECSC and subsequent Treaties for direct elections that Spinelli was able to go so far towards realising, in the form of the Parliament's Draft Treaty, his vision of the citizens' representatives drafting a federal constitution, which led on to the federal elements in subsequent treaties, as well as keeping the aim of a federal European constitution on the agenda.

Spinelli recognised this synergy when he said, on the day after the Parliament's first massive vote in favour of the Draft Treaty in September 1983, that "Monnet has the great merit of having built Europe and the great responsibility to have built it badly", and while it was surely not feasible in 1950 to "build Europe well" in the full sense that Spinelli doubtless had in mind, his radical initiatives in 1951-53 and 1981-84 not only kept the aim of a European federal constitution on the agenda but were also major impulses towards building the Union better. Twenty years later the Convention put the idea of a constitution on the agenda again, though as the name for a less federal and more complicated project than the Parliament's Draft Treaty, and the outcome is almost certain to be some further federal steps. So the final destination of his odyssey is not yet in sight. But his life remains an inspiration for those who are continuing the journey, and in particular for those who wish to complete it.