European value added - EU General Affairs Council style

Where did we leave the EU's General Affairs Council (GAC)?

Potentially influential, but sandwiched in between the other Council configurations and the European Council, largely with the wrong participants based on redundant thinking in many capitals and with conclusions of anaemic pallor: EU General Affairs Council has taken note – So have we (24 November 2010).


Commission Work Programme for 2011

We return to the provisional conclusions of the GAC:

Press release, 3047th Council meeting, General Affairs, Brussels, 22 November 2010 (document 16572/10)

In addition to the English version, the GAC conclusions can be found in Dutch and French.

The entire page 9 is dedicated to the Commission's Work Programme for 2011 (CWP 2011), and the GAC is the coordinating spider in the web, as described earlier, so let us give you the text in full for your enlightenment:

COMMISSION WORK PROGRAMME FOR 2011

The Council took note of the presentation by the Commission of its work programme for 2011 (doc.
15772/10 + ADD 1).

For the sake of fairness, let me add that the document number and the ADD 1 are links in the original.

So much for European added value.


CWP 2011 documents

Published 27 October 2010, the CWP 2011 documents in question are:

Commission Work Programme 2011 VOLUME I - Commission document COM(2010) 623 final - VOLUME I (Council document 15772/10) (12 pages)

Commission Work Programme 2011 VOLUME II - Commission document COM(2010) 623 final - VOLUME II (Council document 15772/10 ADD 1) (43 pages)


What should I say?

Four weeks on from publication, eager Europeans have been offered links to these public documents as numbered by the Council.

We are none the wiser with regard to the views about the choice of priorities, possible consensus, simmering tensions etc.

European added value?

Zilch.



Ralf Grahn



P.S. You don't have to be able to read Swedish in order to understand how the thematic portal Europaportalen.se offers a rich fare of news, links and debate concerning European issues, from domestic sources as well as from ”Brussels”. Europaportalen.se is a jointly owned by the main trade unions and the confederation of industry in Sweden. How about making it possible elsewhere in the European Union?

A busy week in the European Union: European Council only part of it

It was a busy week in the European Union. The heads of state or government were in the limelight, because the summits or meetings of the institution called the European Council are at the centre of media attention, although a fair amount of the reporting in national media has been through the prism of domestic politics. (Nowhere is this clearer than in the United Kingdom, with perpetual political and media pressure to leave no veto unused.)

It might be a good idea to let the dust settle and to look at what we have at the European level. The customary mainstream documents are the conclusions and the explanation given by the president:

European Council 28-29 October 2010 conclusions (EUCO 25/10)

Remarks by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, at the press conference following the meeting of Heads of State or Government (Brussels, 29 October 2010 PCE 251/10)


Where is the beef?

The general endorsement of the Task force on economic governance sets a few signposts on the road forward, but the summary on first two pages of the European Council conclusions relies heavily on the sources, the Task force report, a helpful factsheet and the proposals made by the European Commission:

Strengthening economic governance in the EU – Report of the Task force to the European Council (21 October 2010; 17 pages)

Factsheet on the surveillance procedures in the EU (21 October 2010; 3 pages)

Package of Commission proposals on EU economic governance [DG Ecfin 29 September 2010]

The official conclusions from the European Council are, as we can see, only the tip of the iceberg: two pages above the surface, but a reading marathon below.


Mundane tasks

We can see the “tip of the iceberg” from another angle as well. Much of what the European Union does consists of important but mundane tasks, bundled under ‘union policies and internal actions’ in Part Three of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

While the summit stole the media limelight, last week the Commission churned out a number of relevant documents. These underreported reports and proposals concerned, inter alia, the Single Market Act, EU citizenship, a new industrial policy and the Commission Work Programme for 2011 (CWP 2011).




Ralf Grahn


P.S. There is a new kid (in a politico-zoological sense as well) on the French block of the multilingual Euroblog aggregator Bloggingportal.eu (which has grown to 687 blogs related to European affairs). The blog or web magazine Europe – 27etc has made its appearance. The slogan of the blog collective is: “Parce que l’Europe n’est pas une affaire étrangère”. There are six regular contributors (“les Cabris de l’Europe”, in a historic reference to the nationalist president de Gaulle; they write under pseudonyms, to guarantee freedom of expression), and nineteen guest writers have already signed up. Impressive start!