One of the key issues to be discussed at the forthcoming European Council in Nice is the need for changes in the institutional structure of the European Union to accommodate enlargement, which will eventually increase its membership to around 30 states.
The European Commission is among the institutions the composition of which has been under discussion. The provision under which larger states have two commissioners may well be dropped in return for greater weighting of these states in the qualified-majority voting procedure of the Council of Ministers.
The right of every state to have a member of the commission is also being challenged on the grounds that as enlargement gradually increases the union's membership towards something like 30, a system of rotation of Commission membership might be desirable to keep this body's size down to a manageable level.
This proposal appears to have a certain plausibility, but it overlooks the importance of membership of the Commission as a legitimating factor in the actual working of the European Union. Because of its size and cultural diversity the EU already suffers from being remote from its population, and the European Parliament has so far failed to fill this gap adequately.
At the same time a council of ministers that takes many decisions by qualified-majority voting, as it must do to prevent all progress being blocked by national vetoes cast under pressure from national vested interests, escapes democratic control by national parliaments.
This is more of an issue for smaller countries, whose peoples especially value the Commission's role as protector both of the general European interest and of the interests of smaller states vis-a-vis larger countries. Suspicion of the motives of some larger countries in pressing the issue of reducing the size of the Commission has been heightened by several features of the negotiations leading up to the Nice European Council.
First of all, we have heard voices from several larger states raised in favour of a longer-term evolution of the community in which the role of the Commission is either absent, or is to be minimised.
There is strong pressure from these sources in favour of a shift back to inter-governmentalism in the evolution of European policies on global issues. And we all know from past experience that inter-governmentalism can mean decisions being imposed by large states upon small ones. And that is precisely the fate from which we have been saved by the role the Commission plays in the community decision-making system.
This playing-down of the Commission's role in the future, as envisaged by spokesmen of some larger states, seems all the more ominous when we hear a suggestion that to get agreement on a smaller commission there might be a willingness by larger states to accept their own occasional exclusion from future commissions under a rotation system.
The seeming generosity of such a proposal has been received by smaller states as proof that some larger states must see the Commission as becoming irrelevant in the years ahead, otherwise they wouldn't be willing to envisage their own occasional exclusion from membership of it through rotation.
The British government has sought to conciliate the smaller states by distinguishing its position on the future role of the Commission from that of the French and Germans. In his speech in Warsaw on October 6th, Tony Blair stated that "the Commission's independence as guardian of the treaty would be unchanged".
While this statement is welcome, its value is diminished by the increased role the British envisage for the European Council in the future. Tony Blair sees the European Council as being not only "the final court of appeal from other councils"; he says it should above all be the body which sets the agenda of the union, adding that "indeed, formally in the Treaty of Rome, that is the task given to it".
The British Prime Minister wants the European Council in future to set an annual agenda for the community. How would the Commission's exclusive power of legislative initiative be protected within such a system?
Tony Blair's answer is that the "president of the Commission is a member of the European Council, and would play his full part in drawing up the agenda. He would then bring a proposal for the heads of government to debate, modify and endorse. It would be a clear legislative as well as political programme setting the workload of individual councils".
In theory the role he proposes for the European Council is compatible with the functions allocated to the Commission by the treaties. For the president of the Commission could, of course, exercise its role of exclusive initiator of legislation by telling the European Council that an item they propose for the agenda was unacceptable to the Commission and that it would not be prepared to put forward legislation along such lines.
But if the heads of state of some larger countries wanted to put something on the proposed annual agenda that in the Commission's view was not in the general interest of Europe, including some smaller member-states, it could in practice be very difficult for the president of the Commission to resist and block such a proposal.
All this has to be seen in a context where the French and German governments have tended to be suspiciously silent about the future role of the Commission. But former heads of government of these two states - Helmut Schmidt and Valery Giscard d'Estaing - have explicitly suggested that, in a set of new institutions which they propose for an "inner core" of EMU states, there would "probably not be a commission".
Despite the concerns expressed above it should be said that there is merit in some of the purposes for which certain states want to be able to take joint action as an "inner core" of the union, without having to wait for agreement by all states, including the many new members which will be joining the union in the years ahead.
Among the possible objectives of such action, mentioned by Schmidt and Giscard d'Estaing, are decisions on new international law; arms limitations; managing global trade; dealing with the effects of global warming; handling the streams of refugees and displaced persons; and making the financial markets into a stable and viable global system.
Among these are issues in relation to which, as these two former statesmen remark, Washington may "aspire to maintain some control over Europe to facilitate America's global geo-political aims - and sometimes illusions".
Clearly a stronger European voice on some of these issues might not merely be in the interests of our continent, it could also be of benefit to the world as a whole. So, while seeking to safeguard our interests as a small member-state, we should also recognise that there is a need for a more effective European voice in global affairs.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie