La Résistance Française
Civitas, 16 March 2011
Faced with the possible merger of two of the 12 plenary sessions, France has launched a fierce resistance against the European Parliament. Member states should be able to defend their national interests against conflicting demands of EU membership. However, pandering to French demands would override the decision of the elected MEPs and continue to allow one member state to force all others to shoulder the burden of maintaining an unjustified and costly anachronism.
12 times a year, all 736 MEPs, accompanied by their entourage of staff, spend four days in the French city of Strasbourg performing all the same functions as they do at their Brussels base. This monthly debacle was ceded to France as a concession for shifting almost all the EU institutions and head-of-state summits to Belgium, and the compromise has been something of a cause célèbre ever since.
Draining €180 million from the already stretched European taxpayer and contributing 19,000 tons of CO2 emissions every year, the arrangements have long been criticised as unnecessary and wasteful. In 2006, a petition was delivered to the European Commission by a group of MEPs – led by Cecilia Malmström, then an MEP for Sweden – who opposed the upheaval. After just six months, the petition had collected in excess of one million signatures, and the ‘One Seat’ Campaign website boasts a further 1.2 million. More recently, the cross-party Brussels-Strasbourg Seat Study Group revealed that 91% of MEPs (so all except the French representatives) would prefer all plenary sessions to be held in Brussels.
These sentiments have now played out in the Parliament itself. On 9 March, MEPs voted 357 against 253 to hold two plenary sessions in the same week in October 2012 and 2013. Yet France has reacted to the vote with a veritable cri-de-coeur. French minister for EU Affairs, Laurent Wauquiez, has announced that France will petition the CJEU to order the European Parliament to rescind its “regrettable and inopportune” vote, which he claims “ignores” Protocol 6. Holding two sessions in one week, he argued, would “impede the effective functioning of parliamentary work”, particularly in light of the Parliament’s enhanced powers under the Lisbon Treaty, and undermine the Strasbourg seat as a “concrete representation of a Europe close to its citizens”.
As the proposed alteration could only be achieved with the unanimous agreement of all member states to amend the Treaty, France effectively has a veto on the issue. And the ECJ found in favour of France in 1996, when it challenged attempts by the Parliament to reduce the number of Strasbourg sessions to 10. Nonetheless, this does not spell the final coup de grâce for the reform agenda. MEPs seem determined to chip away at the Strasbourg sittings, even if they cannot eliminate them altogether.
Branding the legal challenge a “serious error”, Ashley Fox MEP, who proposed the merger, cautioned: “If France loses this case, the gates will be open to further reductions in the number of Strasbourg sessions. If it wins, we will find another way of cutting down on the waste associated with the travelling circus.”
And MEPs have already begun speculating about other ways to curb Strasbourg spending: Fox has warned that, were France victorious in the CJEU, MEPs would resort to “plan B” and start a campaign to cut the length of Strasbourg sessions from four days to three. The impact of this reduction on the city’s hotels, restaurants and taxi drivers would be “far worse” than under the current plans.
Of course, it is important for each member state to retain the right of veto in certain, limited cases. But the objections raised by France demonstrate the dangers of a system that is shackled by procedure and treaties, not led by people and democracy. The issue is now one of principle. This is not a matter of granting one EU institution greater powers to trump the will of member states, but of curtailing the ability of one state to pursue an entirely self-serving end against the will and at the (great) expense of its supposed EU ‘partners’. As Chair of the Brussels-Strasbourg Study Group and Vice-President of the Parliament, Edward McMillan-Scott MEP, has stated: “It’s time to take our destiny into our own hands.”