The European Council needed a 'chair' rather than a chief, the President of the European Parliament, Mr Pat Cox, said yesterday. The idea of a "super-presidency", or a "Mr or Mrs Big", who would be throwing their weight around was not acceptable.
Mr Cox, who was in Dublin to address the Institute of European Affairs, stressed that he was giving his personal opinions. The European Parliament would give its own views at the appropriate time, when the Convention had finished its work.
He said he was pleased by the establishment of the Convention and by its working method. The fact that there was media coverage already and a debate was taking place were both healthy developments.
He welcomed the work of the Convention in cleaning up and codifying the treaties and simplifying the way laws were made. Incorporating fundamental rights and giving the EU a legal personality were also positive moves. There was already "palpable progress" across a whole series of areas.
"My own sense is that, in the end of the day, ideally at the Convention and, if not, it will come through an inter-governmental conference, we will discover the appropriate balances, going forward, with these institutions, between large and small. And that balance has not managed yet to express itself in the draft currently available," he told The Irish Times.
"Specifically, on the question of a chair for the European Council, for some continuity of the Presidency, I would be saying, broadly speaking: 'Chair, subject to various conditions, yes; chief, no.'
"The idea of a super-presidency, floating above and beyond accountability, acting as probably Mr Big, maybe even Mrs Big - but I don't know yet who that might be - throwing their weight around, that's simply not acceptable."
It was a different story "if we are looking to better prepare Council meetings, recognising the realities that with four Council meetings a year and 25 capitals it becomes almost 'Mission Impossible' for a serving prime minister to cope with the volume".
He suggested a type of administrative chair: "Someone who will work hard to try to make the General Affairs Council and the other Councils do their work and not keep kicking everything difficult upstairs, so that you do upstairs what is appropriate to that level but not everything. Stop clogging agendas with sequential preferences every six months of someone who wants to leave their thumb-print. All of that could be to the good.
"But we then need to compensate the states, before we come to other institutions, by still full participation. That could be team presidencies, it could be co-chairing."
In addition, the case of the smaller states about the European Commission had to be heeded, as so many of them had "expressed with total clarity their determination to keep a connection".