Follow-up on Byzantine Europe (vs Roman America)
NOW....
The Deoque controversy:
The Nicene Creed
The portion of the expanded Creed that here concerns us reads as follows:
We believe in Europe, the Lady, the giver of prosperity,
who proceeds from Geography and (the Christian) God [Deoque].
With Geographic boundaries and the Lord she is worshipped and glorified.
She has spoken through the Eurocrats.
The growing EU problem: 25 leaders and 25 opinions
Thomas Fuller/IHT
Monday, October 6, 2003
Rome talks highlight issue of 'methodology'
ROME European leaders took their turn around a giant oval table, with each president or prime minister given four minutes to offer a position on the contentious draft of Europe's future constitution.
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This "tour de table" on Saturday was a landmark event for the European Union, the first time that former Soviet bloc countries sat alongside Western European members of the Union, all with equal voting power.
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But the meeting failed to achieve what Italian planners had hoped. And it exposed the enormous challenges facing the EU as it prepares to expand to a union of 25 countries representing 450 million people.
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Meetings on Saturday went into overtime but did not broach what was arguably the most important item of the agenda: a debate about the post of European foreign minister, which has yet to be created.
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Officials complained that they had wasted time listening to prepared speeches that stated positions everyone already knew.
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"There is a problem of methodology," said a foreign minister from a large Western European country. "If everyone takes his turn repeating their positions it can take a very long time." The minister, who asked not to be identified, called it a "heavy" process.
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The meeting Saturday appeared to confirm some analysts' fears that decision-making and spontaneous debate are unwieldy or impossible when 25 leaders sit around a table.
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The meeting also showed the massive and costly logistical problems involved in bringing together leaders.
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The incongruous location for this experiment in pan-European democracy was a series of fascist-era buildings on the outskirts of Rome.
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Hundreds of police officers and riot control units deployed along the periphery of the buildings occasionally scuffled with an estimated 6,000 protesters representing such diverse causes as Sardinian separatism, Palestinian statehood and anarchism.
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The protests were also a magnet for a crowd of young men wielding plastic pipes and empty beer bottles and picking fights with the riot police.
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Inside the buildings, the Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, said he had drawn lessons from the meeting and set out a system that relied more on written submissions by countries seeking to make amendments.
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Foreign ministers did the technical work Saturday. They agreed to scrap a proposal for a legislative council that would have served as a sort of pan-European upper House of Parliament. They also made progress on establishing a system on who should chair specialized meetings - on agriculture or the environment, for example - in the expanded union.
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But they failed to discuss the creation of a post of foreign minister and to decide what this job would entail, a topic that had been described as the most important of the day.
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"They achieved the things which were frankly quite easy to do," said Peter Ludlow, head of Eurocomment, a research institute in Brussels.
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Ludlow said the size of the meeting put extra pressure on the Italians to direct the debate and write drafts acceptable to all. The constitution can be passed only through unanimity.
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"They are at some point going to have to be magicians," Ludlow said of the Italian organizers. "The question is who is going to be the creative thinker who will draft the compromises."
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The main lines of disagreement were over the future voting system, the size of the European Commission and whether to include a reference to Christianity in the document. [ie Deoque or not]
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Leaders of larger countries, who are more enthusiastic supporters of the draft, issued thinly disguised threats about withholding funding if they did not get their way.
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The 10 Eastern European and Mediterranean countries scheduled to join the EU in May had already participated in meetings before the summit meeting Saturday. But this was the first time that countries like Latvia, Poland or the Czech Republic were given a vote equal to that of Germany or France.
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As newcomers to the club, the Eastern European countries were surprisingly assertive.
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The Czech prime minister, Vladimir Spidla, criticized a two-speed Europe in which countries would have the option to participate in a common military program - a provision currently included in the draft constitution.
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"With enlargement we overcame the historical division of Europe," Spidla told his fellow leaders. "We should not be giving impetus to new divisions."
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The Poles, who on the question of the constitution have been among the most aggressive campaigners of all countries, new and old, forcefully repeated their position that the voting weights laid out in the Nice treaty of 2000 should not be changed.
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That treaty gives the Poles disproportionately high voting power, while the draft constitution proposes a mathematical system based on population that would substantially reduce their weighting.
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The Hungarians sought a clause in the new constitution protecting the rights of minorities. More than two million ethnic Hungarians live in Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia.
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The Italian government, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, hopes a final draft of the constitution can be agreed upon before Christmas.
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International Herald Tribune
iht.com
AND THEN....
The Filioque controversy:
thefathershouse.org
web3.foxinternet.com |
