At last week’s European Union summit in Brussels, most people were so focused on the Greek debt crisis that they missed an interesting development on the sidelines. This was an informal proposal from Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s full-time president, to convene summits of EU heads of state and government once a month.
It would be a significant departure from the way the EU conducts its affairs. At present the EU holds four scheduled summits a year, usually in March, June, October and December. Since the financial crisis erupted in 2007-08, there have been various emergency summits as well. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who ran the EU’s rotating presidency in the second half of 2008, holds the record for calling unscheduled summits. Apart from those dealing with the financial crisis, he also convened one in response to Russia’s war with Georgia.
Under Van Rompuy’s proposal, there would probably not be 12 summits a year. For all his enthusiasm, he recognises that Europe switches off its alarm clock in August. The Christmas-New Year and Easter periods are extremely quiet, too, by the standards of much of the world. So there would most likely be 10 summits every year. But even this would represent a very different way of doing things.
If you took a jaundiced view of politicians, you could write off the proposal as a pure power grab on Van Rompuy’s part. But he takes the view that EU summits, as presently organised, do not produce value for money. It is simply impossible, with 27 national leaders around the table (as well as Van Rompuy himself, José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, and perhaps one or two others), to conduct business efficiently. If everyone insists on speaking just for five minutes, you are looking at two and a half hours drifting by without a proper discussion even starting.
I have heard this argument on numerous occasions since the EU’s enlargement from 15 to 27 member-states in 2004-2007, and I am not sure that I buy it. From everything I hear, it is not the case that each national leader demands the right to make an opening statement at a summit. At last Thursday’s summit, after Van Rompuy outlined the statement of political support for Greece that had been agreed by the eurozone’s top leaders earlier in the day, few if any other EU leaders felt the need to comment at all.
But the view persists in Brussels and in some national capitals that a 27-member club is too unwieldy. The most pro-integrationist circles favour a sort of “regional spokesman” system in which one central European country would speak for all four Visegrad states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), one Benelux country would speak for Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, one Baltic state for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and so on.
I can’t see it coming to this any time soon. To take just one example, I doubt that the Netherlands would want Belgium or Luxembourg to speak on its behalf on a whole range of dossiers.
Nevertheless, an era of more frequent summits may be drawing closer. After all, part of the rationale behind the creation of the full-time EU presidency was to improve the efficiency of the European Council, which groups EU national governments. Van Rompuy reckons that shorter, more frequent, more focused summits would help EU leaders deal with the business at hand better than the more laborious system that obtains now. How far he gets with his proposal will be a test of his standing with his fellow-leaders.
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