Year LXV, 2023, Single Issue, Page 55
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF GIORGIO NAPOLITANO
AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
TO THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION OF 2002–2003*
Thank you for the invitation to this conference, which gives me the opportunity to recall, briefly, the contributions made by Giorgio Napolitano and by the European Parliament to the 2002–2003 European Convention that drafted the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, subsequently signed in Rome on 29 October, 2004.
Having been fortunate enough to know both men, I wish to begin by saying a few words about the relationship between Giorgio Napolitano and Altiero Spinelli. There was never anything fideistic or sentimental about Napolitano’s admiration for Altiero Spinelli, or about his support for the values of the European integration project. His support for these values was, on the contrary, always rational, rather like the thinking of Spinelli himself when he chose to criticise communist doctrine and leave the PCI (Italian Communist Party) because they conflicted with his values and did not allow him freedom of thought. Although Giorgio Napolitano remained a member of the PCI, he, like Spinelli, followed a path that led him to acknowledge the core values of freedom and civilisation that are the basis both of European history and of the European federal integration project. I like to think that Giorgio Napolitano’s admiration for Altiero was also born of the fact that Spinelli, unlike other ex-communists, never assumed visceral anti-communist positions, but rather remained faithful to the values fundamental to European socialism: solidarity and the defence of social rights.
Other speakers have already recalled how Giorgio Napolitano, despite not being a member of the European Parliament’s delegation, participated actively in the work of the European Convention chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, sending personal messages and informal documents in support of efforts to provide the European Union with a Constitution or a constitution-like text. Essentially, Napolitano, together with parliamentarians including Alain Lamassoure, Andrew Duff and Mendes de Vigo, strove to defend the Community or constituent method that was the framework for the action of European parliamentarians.
The main outcomes of their efforts were:
1) extension of the European Union’s competences to judicial cooperation and to the new so-called support competences: this outcome was reached thanks to the opposition of the members of the parliamentary delegation to the attempts, in particular by some British members of the Convention to reduce the EU’s competences;
2) retention of the European Commission’s right of legislative initiative in return for annual and multiannual legislative programming that would allow the European Parliament to express its opinion on the Commission’s legislative programme (see article 17 of the Treaty);
3) maintenance of the European Commission’s executive powers, providing adoption of the so-called delegated decrees that modified pre-existing European laws be subject to the tacit or express agreement of the European Parliament;
4) rejection of a “second” legislative chamber of national parliaments — this solution had been requested in particular by the British representatives — in exchange for the creation of a procedure for monitoring the principle of subsidiarity, as proposed by Mendes de Vigo in the working group on national parliaments.
The European Convention, in the initial stages of its work, moved in an innovative and substantially constituent direction. Towards the end, however, this work unfortunately took an intergovernmental turn which had the effect of turning the whole Convention into a de facto intergovernmental conference. To illustrate its ultimately IGC-like approach, I will simply recall how the creation of a permanent President of the European Council, proposed by the large member states, was, in the end, rejected in favour of a reduction of the number of European Commissioners, providing these be chosen on a rotating basis from among all the member states, as requested by the small ones. Furthermore, in the last two sessions of the Convention, its members (the majority) in favour of an extension of majority voting to the areas of foreign policy, taxation, social policy (in part) and the future revision of certain Treaty provisions were opposed and defeated by the German and French members with their request to introduce unanimity voting for, respectively, the setting of migrant quotas and the conclusion of trade agreements that could harm cultural diversity.
Should a new convention to revise the Treaty of Lisbon ever be called, it will be necessary to ensure at all costs that the innovative and substantially constituent method that prevailed at the start of the Giscardian one is not replaced by the IGC-type approach that characterised its work at the end.
Paolo Ponzano
[*] This text is based on an address given at the conference Giorgio Napolitano e la democrazia parlamentare europea. Visioni e testimonianze (Giorgio Napolitano and European Parliamentary Democracy. Visions and testimony) held by the Movimento Europeo Italia at the Senate in Rome on Thursday, 22 February, 2024. The recording of the conference can be accessed at: https://www.radioradicale.it/scheda/721484/giorgio-napolitano-e-la-democrazia-parlamentare-europea-visioni-e-testimonianze-. The present address begins at minute 2h 56’.
Paolo Ponzano was Alternate Member of the European Convention in 2002/2003.
