MOTION FOR A RESOLUTION on the follow-up to the conclusions of the Conference on the Future of Europe
2.5.2022 - (2022/2648(RSP))
pursuant to Rule 132(2) of the Rules of Procedure
Zdzisław Krasnodębski
on behalf of the ECR Group
B9‑0229/2022
European Parliament resolution on the follow-up to the conclusions of the Conference on the Future of Europe
The European Parliament,
– having regard to the Joint Declaration on the Conference on the Future of Europe,
– having regard to the Rules of Procedure of the Conference on the Future of Europe,
– having regard to the documents prepared by the nine thematic working groups of the Conference on the Future of Europe and to the final draft proposals to be submitted to the COFE Executive Board,
– having regard to Rule 132(2) of its Rules of Procedure,
A. whereas public opinion is growing increasingly sceptical about the ability of the European Union to deliver practical results and is alarmed by the ideological drive towards the establishment of a centralised European federal superstate, which seeks to exercise powers that are more properly to be exercised at the level of the Member States, their regional and local authorities, or by citizens themselves;
B. whereas the citizens of the Member States want a community of sovereign nations in which their countries cooperate in common institutions and in accordance with the rule of law; whereas the essential principles of conferral, subsidiarity, and proportionality need therefore to be re-asserted in a European Union that is a looser confederal association of nation-states acting together only when added value can be proved, rather than a centralised federal state;
C. whereas many policy areas of the European Union need to be overhauled to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century;
D. whereas the European Parliament Delegation did not give its consent to the draft proposals of the Conference on the Future of Europe unanimously;
E. whereas the Council reserved its position on each individual proposal;
F. whereas there was no consensus among the national parliaments, and the French coordination simply announced that the national parliaments component had merely agreed to ‘transmit’ the proposals to the Executive Board;
Part 1: Overall assessment
1. Regrets that an opportunity for a genuinely open consultation and deep public debate on the future of the European Union has been wasted;
2. Recognises that many citizens made sincere and genuine efforts to participate in the discussions of the citizens’ panels and other aspects of the work of the Conference; expresses gratitude for their efforts; regrets, however, that they were caught up in a process that was fundamentally flawed;
3. Deplores the fact that the timetable for the conference did not give sufficient time for a thorough and profound debate about the future of Europe on a continental scale with widespread participation, but was in fact simply designed originally to suit the electoral needs and timetable of one man in one Member State;
4. Deplores the lack of transparency regarding the financing of the Conference; calls for full disclosure of all the expenditures made by the Commission, the Council and Parliament on the Conference to be made public; insists that full disclosure must include:
– all direct costs, such as advertising, meetings and participants’ expenses,
– all indirect costs, such as overheads, staff salaries and expenses and the use of institutional facilities;
5. Regrets that many organisers of this conference appear not to have seen the process as a way to listen to public opinion and start a bottom-up process of rebuilding trust in the European Union, but rather as a top-down method to legitimise their own ambitions for a centralised federal Europe;
6. Condemns the reality that the conference organisers, when setting the agenda and selecting the participants, ensured that the central question of the European debate was marginalised when it should have been central to the whole discussion: is the European Union to be a single state with a single European people or a community of Member States that respects the rights and sovereignty of their citizens;
7. Believes that there was never a clear understanding among the four components about the way the Conference would function; notes that the ambiguities in the Joint Declaration and Rules of Procedure for the Conference on the Future of Europe caused confusion about the way the Conference should operate; notes that Parliament wanted a process that would replicate its own structure of committees and a plenary, so that the input from the citizens in the European panels, national panels, events and online platform would feed into working groups where parliamentarians could filter the recommendations and make proposals of their own in order to take control of the documents submitted to plenary;
8. Regrets that the selection of some national parliamentary delegations favoured governing parties and other established political parties while excluding newer parties that express dissenting views and challenge the traditional status quo, not least over European integration;
9. Expresses its disappointment that the citizens, Member States and national parliamentarians were effectively caught in a coordinated pincer movement organised by the federalist caucus in the European Parliament and its allies in the centralist pan-European NGOs;
10. Condemns the cynical way the federalist caucus in the European Parliament seized the opportunity to manipulate the conference process; deplores the way in which the caucus instrumentalised a small group of citizens as a means of leverage to pursue their centralist agenda and to advance their immediate objectives of securing treaty change in order to further their long-standing aims such as, for example, diminishing the rights of Member States by removing national vetoes, initiating a ‘Spitzenkandidat’ process and introducing transnational lists for European elections;
11. Deplores the way in which national parliamentarians were disadvantaged by the process which favoured components such as the Commission and the European Parliament that had the resources and infrastructure to invest considerable time and effort into steering the process; notes that the national parliamentarians’ dissatisfaction with the process was demonstrated when this component failed to endorse the conclusions and was only able to agree to allow them to be ‘transmitted’ to the Executive Board, a decision which is tantamount to rejection;
12. Notes that the Council has reserved its position on each specific proposal contained in the conclusions; emphasises that the Council, by taking this position, cannot be said to have endorsed the conclusions;
13. Emphasises that the positions of two of the four components in the conference plenary were in effect to express neutrality rather than support;
14. Regrets the fact that the conference process has sadly amounted to little more than an elaborate and expensive method for the Brussels federalist caucus to have a pretext for launching a new round of European centralisation with more money and more powers for the supranational institutions of the European Union; notes that the federalists launched their calls for a new treaty convention to advance their institutional agenda even before the conference process had concluded;
15. Emphasises that the imposition of a top-down agenda and the manipulation of the process made it practically impossible for the conference to address the real concerns of the citizens of Europe regarding the European Union and precluded any in-depth discussions about how best to uphold the principles of conferral, subsidiarity and proportionality;
16. Rejects the idea that institutional change and a treaty convention are the foremost concerns of Europeans as Europe struggles to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, faces a cost of living crisis, and deals with a weak economy with all the inherent consequences for jobs, living standards and public services, while war rages on our continent;
17. Believes that the final report should have been an open document, which should have included all the various submissions made and ideas discussed; argues that the final papers could and should have respected all opinions equally, and not just those with which the federalist caucus agreed; regrets that minority and dissenting opinions have been poorly treated;
18. Deplores the reality that the closed nature of the conference process and the failure to organise any independent polling to test any of the recommendations has resulted in simply enlarging the ‘Brussels bubble’ into a ‘Conference bubble’;
19. Regrets that the following design flaws made the process unreliable and therefore irrelevant:
– the built-in ‘centralisation bias’ in favour of further integration,
– the absence of a genuine EU-wide public debate,
– the failure of the online platform and national events,
– the weaknesses in the selection and operation of the citizens’ panels,
– the over-representation of young people and the fake ‘Youth Ideas Report’,
– the role of integrationist NGOs,
– the way federalist MEPs seized control of the process,
– the lack of any European-wide polling or other public discussions;
20. Rejects the so-called conclusions of the process and calls for the follow-up of work of the conference to be suspended pending a genuine and objective public consultation;
21. Demands that a serious in-depth opinion polling exercise be undertaken in each Member State, with results published by Member State, to assess whether their citizens really do support proposals that have been made in their name;
22. Insists that this opinion polling should incorporate a ‘subsidiarity test’, to test not just whether an idea has merit but to test equally what would be the most appropriate level of government for it to be undertaken;
23. Further insists that such an opinion polling exercise should also consult about existing powers of the European Union and whether some of these should be returned to the Member States;
24. Demands that a series of citizens’ panel debates be organised in each Member State in cooperation with national parliaments to discuss the draft recommendations and to identify the real level of support and interest in each country;
25. Stresses that the only conference formally able to propose amendments to the Treaties is a ‘conference of representatives of the governments of the Member States’ as provided for in Article 48(4) of the Treaty on European Union, and that in accordance with this Article such amendments can only enter into force ‘after being ratified by all the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements’;
Part 2: Analysis of the flaws in the process
The built-in centralisation bias in favour of further integration
26. Deplores the way the agenda was set in a top-down manner and that this choice of subjects steered participants during the process; notes that the tone was set at the launch event of 9 May 2021 when the choice of films and questions demonstrated a left-wing bias;
27. Regrets that inevitably the citizens’ panel discussions were characterised by a ‘centralisation bias’, as policy discussions ended up focusing on the merits of the policy itself and not the merits of undertaking such policies at the European level; notes that the need to act at the European level was taken as a built-in assumption by the structure of the programme and agenda, reinforced by the activities of most MEPs and the integrationist NGOs, and that this was designed to preclude a response of ‘this is an excellent policy idea but it should be implemented at another level of government within our Member States, not by the EU’; regrets that as a result of this ‘centralisation bias’ debate on the key issue of subsidiarity was marginalised when it should have been central to the debates; emphasises that most citizens across the Member States believe that the European Union tries to do too much and undermines its Member States and the rights of their citizens, but that this concern was largely ignored by the Conference;
The absence of a genuine EU-wide public debate
28. Notes that there is little evidence that the Conference has had any impact on European public opinion and that it has completely failed to stimulate a broad public debate;
29. Further notes that there has been little coverage of any Conference activities in the national media in the Member States;
30. Recognises that the digital platform barely gained any traction within the Member States, with relatively few participants and limited activity;
31. Deeply regrets that so much attention has been placed on organising the central conference events that any attempt to stimulate a meaningful debate within the Member States has been noticeable by its absence; notes that the matter has hardly featured in any national media or been covered in any parliament of the EU’s Member States; concludes that outside the Brussels bubble, it is as if the Conference had never taken place;
The failure of the online platform and national events
32. Notes that the integration of what comments there were on the online platform with the work of the conference plenary was very poor; emphasises that the summaries of platform activity hardly featured in the work of the Conference itself and might as well not have existed in practice; deplores the reality that the online platform was just a cosmetic attempt to make the process seem more open than it was in reality;
33. Notes that relatively few events were organised in the Member States to feed into the Conference; emphasises that most national events were organised by pro-European NGOs and by governmental bodies; notes, however, that these events had little bearing on the deliberations of the plenary and were largely irrelevant;
The weaknesses in the selection and operation of the citizens’ panels
34. Criticises the way in which the members of the citizens’ panels were selected, as this unavoidably built in a bias towards those more enthusiastic about the EU and against those more critical of it; regrets that as the panels were organised on a European-wide basis, rather than in each Member State, invited participants had to be willing to give up considerable time to participate in the initiative and that this would be more attractive to enthusiasts than critics of the European Union; notes that it is hardly surprising that international meetings will be more attractive to internationalists, but that this bias should have been taken into account and a simpler pillar of citizens’ panels within each Member State should have been established;
35. Regrets that the selection was based on a number of socio-economic factors but not political beliefs, which ignores the simple reality that individuals from the same socio-economic background, but with differing opinions regarding the European Union, will not respond equally to an invitation to give up several weekends to travel overseas to talk at length about the EU; notes that an independent opinion poll demonstrated that among those ‘likely to accept’ an invitation to participate in such a conference, pro-Europeans were almost twice as likely to accept than those more sceptical; further notes that among those who would ‘definitely refuse’ the invitation, the more sceptical citizens outnumber the pro-Europeans by a margin of 3 to 2; believes that the selection criteria should have tried to correct this imbalance;
36. Criticises the way that the panels were centrally controlled and organised in a top-down manner:
– the agendas were set by the organisers,
– the experts were chosen by the organisers, selected as ‘independent’ but all of whom were drawn from within the pro-EU establishment,
– participants were not given the power to invite their own experts to comment,
– debates were not set up to hear contrasting and conflicting points of view, nor were external speakers invited to offer contrasting opinions to stimulate debate;
37. Regrets that insufficient effort was made to connect participating citizens and elected parliamentarians through means of shared contact details and ongoing discussions online that would have facilitated a greater informal exchange of ideas and information;
38. Regrets that the flawed design of the citizens’ panels renders their conclusions of limited value;
The over-representation of young people and the fake ‘Youth Ideas Report’
39. Notes that young people between the ages of 16 and 24 represent approximately 11 % of Europe’s actual population but were recruited to make up almost one third of the membership of the citizens’ panels, on the spurious grounds that young people between 1 day and 29 years old make up about 32 % of Europe’s population;
40. Rejects the idea that young people between the ages of 16 and 24 have the right or ability to defend the interests of everyone under 30 years old; believes that it was absurd to assert by this means, for example, that a 17-year-old was better able to defend the long-term interests of a one-year-old than this child’s 29-year-old parents;
41. Deplores, therefore, the over-representation of young people in the conference, which was done cynically for reasons of political advantage in support of a specific agenda and not for reasons of idealism about the ‘future’ of Europe;
42. Regrets that this over-representation has contributed significantly to the de-legitimisation of all the work of the citizens’ panels;
43. Notes that the design of the digital platform favoured those with the necessary digital skills and so may have made participation difficult for some but not others, especially the young;
44. Condemns the causal ageism that became a characteristic of the conference process;
45. Notes that the ‘Youth Ideas Report’ was given a great deal of prominence as a document representing the views of Europe’s young people, while in reality it was prepared by a handful of activists selected by staff of the European Parliament; recalls that the facts are as follows:
– relatively few young people participated in the vote on the ideas it contains and no objective polling by independent and reputable agencies was undertaken,
– those who did participate in the vote were not given an open choice but were simply invited to order a carefully pre-selected list of exactly 20 ideas,
– the list of 20 options was compiled by about 12 young people who had in turn been carefully selected to serve as an ‘Editors Team’ by the Parliament’s own ‘Youth Outreach Unit’ in its Directorate-General for Communication;
46. Notes that it is hardly surprising that the ‘Editors Team’, given its lack of independence, would call for ‘a federal state’ and include in its list of 20 ideas, key demands and policy preferences of the European Parliament such as the ‘Spitzenkandidat’ process and transnational lists;
47. Emphatically rejects, therefore, the claim of its editors that the so-called ‘Youth Ideas Report’ represents ‘a true and fair representation of young people’s top expectations for future policy-making’, given that it was a document subtly prepared in practice by the European Parliament’s own Directorate-General for Communication;
The role of integrationist NGOs
48. Emphasises that the ‘citizens’ component of the plenary was in fact influenced by numerous activists from integrationist NGOs who had been nominated as ‘social partners’ or citizens’ national representatives;
49. Notes that caucus meetings for citizens were held during the plenary, chaired by representatives of the self-styled ‘Civil Society Convention on the Future of Europe’, the European Movement International (EMI) and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC); notes that the Civil Society Convention on the Future of Europe is chaired by the Secretary-General of the European Civic Forum and the Secretary-General of the Young European Federalists;
50. Deplores the reality that these integrationist NGOs positioned themselves as the ‘leaders’ of the citizens’ component of the plenary and sought to shape the debate by steering discussions in favour of their own political agendas;
The way federalist MEPs seized control of the process
51. Deplores the way in which European parliamentarians used their experience, networks and resources to seize control of the conference process;
52. Notes that the original intention, as set out in the Rules of Procedure of the Conference, was that the citizens’ panels would formulate ‘a set of recommendations for the Union to follow up on’, but by the end of the process these recommendations had been lost and superseded by the conclusions of the working groups, set up at the express demand of the European Parliament delegation, which used the imposition of a two-step process in drafting recommendations;
53. Notes that the working groups became the decisive decision-making bodies in the conference process, even though they were not mentioned in the sections of the Rules related to conference governance and were merely included as a technical point in the section related to the conduct of plenary meetings; condemns the cynical way in which the European Parliament delegation to the conference imposed an unforeseen two-step process in drafting conclusions, by means of the establishment of the working groups as a tool to bring the citizens’ panels under control and to usurp the powers given to the Executive Board in the Rules;
54. Condemns the way that the federalist caucus of the European Parliament sought to impose a filtration system on the plenary’s drafting process by scrutinising all the submissions made and comparing them with the existing policies of the European Parliament; regrets that it deliberately sought to manipulate the summaries of the discussion by going through all the available contributions and cherry-picking those which were consistent with existing Parliament policies, while marginalising all other ideas, including minority opinions, with which it disagreed; deplores this approach of ‘democratic centralism’, which has meant that the final documents largely reflect existing positions of the European Parliament, making the process largely meaningless;
55. Criticises the transparently self-serving attempts of many Members of the federalist caucus in the European Parliament to clutch at whatever straws could be found anywhere in the process to justify pushing their traditional integrationist agenda and specifically such concepts as transnational lists and ‘Spitzenkandidaten’;
56. Notes that, given that the COFE format is similar to the European Parliament, it was inevitable that MEPs would be well placed to take control of the conference discussions, especially in the closing stages, as they could use existing networks and had an organisational support structure in place to organise meetings and prepare documentation; notes that as a result it was inevitable that the European Parliament delegation would be far better organised and familiar with the working methods required to reach an outcome they would deem acceptable than would the participants in the other pillars, let alone the citizen participants themselves;
57. Regrets the undemocratic nature of the working groups, where the appointed Chairs held disproportionate power over the preparation of documents and ultimately in writing the so-called conclusions of the conference;
The lack of any European-wide polling or other public discussions
58. Condemns the failure to test any of the recommendations or conclusions outside of the conference bubble, and the fact that no European-wide consultation process has been envisaged; believes that the final documents should simply have served as a ‘green paper’, bringing ideas together which could then be tested through objective opinion polls and scrutinised by citizens within the Member States;
59. Regrets that, as a consequence, the conference process has been operating in its own self-contained sphere, out of touch with the public and with political realities;
Conclusion
60. Concludes that, for the reasons cited above, the conference failed to reconnect the institutions of the European Union with the citizens of the Member States and has been a missed opportunity for a widespread consultation and profound reflection on Europe’s future;
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61. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the European Council, and the governments and parliaments of the Member States.