17 June 2022

Carnegie: Does the EU Need Treaty Change?

EU integration has been propelled by both treaty change and improvised action. To continue to adapt and respond in this era of crises, the union should adopt limited treaty amendments that implement the conclusions reached at the Conference on the Future of Europe.

After the recent conclusion of the Conference on the Future of Europe, the EU is facing a decision about whether to launch a reform of the EU treaty, the first such effort since the Lisbon Treaty entered into force in 2009. While the European Parliament is strongly in favor, member states are divided. Several governments take the view that the EU has shown itself to be resilient and capable during many tough years of crisis management and does not at present need structural reforms. But others believe that revisions to the existing text would make the EU more effective in tackling future challenges. This article looks into the two dynamics of change in European integration, the regular treaty reforms of earlier decades and the crisis-driven improvisation that marked the last thirteen years. It also suggests a pragmatic approach toward limited treaty amendments as the most constructive way forward under the difficult circumstances of today.

The Conference on the Future of Europe

After a year of work, the Conference on the Future of Europe concluded its business on May 9, 2022. Most Europeans won’t be aware that it ever happened. In terms of eliciting the interest of the public, the enterprise has been singularly unlucky. First, the pandemic delayed and hindered its work; then, the Russian aggression against Ukraine overshadowed the endgame. A process conceived to frame the future of European integration thus took place in almost complete obscurity.

The fact that EU institutions approached the conference in very different ways did not help. The European Parliament aimed for an ambitious deepening of integration similar to the constitutional convention of 2002–2003. From the parliament’s point of view, the conference’s recommendations should be implemented through new legislation as well as through treaty change. By contrast, the Council of Ministers wished to avoid a reform dynamic that would be hard to control and made clear that the conference did not imply treaty change. The European Commission, for its part, emphasized the citizens’ panels and the digital platform as innovative instruments to enhance citizen participation in EU politics.

In actual fact, the four citizens’ panels, made up of 200 randomly chosen citizens each, turned out to be the centerpiece of the conference. The selected citizens showed impressive engagement in deliberating on topics ranging from health, climate, and social policy to migration and foreign policy. Given the extremely broad subjects and the narrow time frame (just three two-day sessions per panel), the process fell short of real deliberative democracy, which ideally should involve citizens carefully weighing options and converging toward broadly acceptable solutions to difficult problems. Instead, the citizens drafted lists of recommendations for future EU action. During the latter part of the conference, the plenary and its working groups filtered and repackaged these recommendations into a document with forty-nine proposals encompassing more than 300 measures.

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