The ratification of the Lisbon Treaty at the end of last year, following eight years of institutional introspection, gives rise to mixed feelings for proponents of EU integration – relief and an element of exhaustion. The debate on the Treaty pushed its proponents into a corner, to the point where in the end – to paraphrase Churchill’s definition of democracy – they came to consider this treaty as the worst form of treaty except all those other ones that could have been conceived. The battle to ratify the Treaty ultimately turned very defensive – now drawn out further into rather inglorious horse-trading over posts – so that we ended up, as it were, not quite able to see the trees for the wood. We perhaps omitted to point out that this treaty would be what we made of it; we forgot to highlight the Treaty’s potential, particularly in terms of participation. In short, now is the time to leave the inertia of ratification behind us: it is time to bring this treaty to life!

While this treaty will define the rules of the institutional game for the foreseeable future, it will not set policy direction in stone, as this falls primarily to the member state governments, the Commission and the Parliament. The scene is therefore set for a series of battles to be fought by progressive local and regional elected representatives over the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty. In this, they can draw on Lisbon’s bolstering of the territorial dimension in relation to previous treaties.

The first example of this is the introduction of the new objective of territorial cohesion.1 This new objective has been interpreted by EU local and regional authorities as a guarantee that regional policy will remain important to all EU member states, despite rumblings during the last round of negotiations on the financial perspectives that this policy should be re-nationalised, which will probably resurface during the debate on the financial perspectives post-2013. At the same time, the introduction of the territorial cohesion objective provides a legal basis for the requirement of carrying out territorial impact analyses prior to the presentation of EU legislation. This requirement should also lead to a qualitative leap forward in the work on the territorial impact analysis of EU legislation, the work undertaken here by the Commission to date being only in its early stages.

For progressive players, this understanding of the objective of territorial cohesion is all the more important given that there are significant analogies here with what many of us believe to be the modus operandi of the horizontal social clause2, which has probably been insufficiently discussed to date.

Among the other participatory mechanisms of the Lisbon Treaty that are the focus of attention of local and regional authorities are the instrument of ‘popular initiative’ and the subsidiarity principle.
The practicalities of the popular initiative procedure urgently need to be defined, and outlined in a Commission white paper. The number of member states required for an initiative to be accepted, the percentage of the population to be represented and the means by which signatures are to be collected are some of the outstanding issues in this regard. In any case, going on the many precedents in our respective member states, it is conceivable that our regions could play a certain role as an initiator, intermediary or unifying body for these popular initiatives.

Furthermore, the Lisbon Treaty will also enable us to leave behind the very academic and almost virtual approach that we have had so far to the principle of subsidiarity. There will be, on the one hand, the quasi-coercive mechanism of bringing an action before the Court of Justice, which will now be open to the Committee of the Regions (CoR), making it de facto an EU institution, given that only the institutions (in the legal sense of the word) and the member states may call the Court of Justice. But this right of recourse alone does not of itself constitute a policy. On the contrary, the key will be to have the least possible recourse to the ‘coercive’ aspect of subsidiarity, namely setting mechanisms and procedures in motion for bringing to a halt pieces of legislation. Indeed the very fact of needing to set these in motion already entails the investment of a great deal of political and administrative energy in something with an uncertain outcome. That is why it will be necessary to ensure that the phase upstream of a legislative proposal meets the requirements of involving local and regional authorities on a partnership basis: this is largely what the CoR understands by multilevel governance.3

Multilevel governance can also be viewed from another perspective: that the new responsibilities and competences of the new Commission and the new European Parliament should be put into practice in the exercise of power. For, the key issue in European policymaking is no longer simply who does what – which is stipulated in the Lisbon Treaty – or what to do, but rather how to do it. And multilevel governance should enable us to perceive regulation at EU level beyond the mere written rules and procedures laid down in the treaties. It is a question of method, which takes on a particular dimension in the current context in which a need has emerged for new forms of EU regulation in the face of economic, financial, social and climate crises.

Another key area of activity for local and regional authorities is the protection of public services, which is now the subject of a specific protocol. This unprecedented text should enable better account to be taken of the specific requirements of these services, which EU integration has tended to ignore in the past in favour of those of competition law. It is, to an extent, the outcome of public rallying in recent years, followed up by Europe’s progressive regional and local politicians, but also of significant developments in case law tending towards their recognition.

The protocol stipulates that member states and local and regional authorities thus have ‘wide discretion […] in providing, commissioning and organising services of general economic interest’ (SGEI); on the other hand, the EU and the respective public authorities ‘shall take care that such services operate on the basis of […] economic and financial conditions, which enable them to fulfil their missions’. Furthermore, the Treaty now includes a certain number of European principles in respect of services of general interest (high level of quality, safety and affordability, equal treatment and the promotion of universal access and of user rights) and establishes a specific legal basis for the adoption of a cross-cutting text. Moreover, access to SGEI is considered an EU citizen’s right under the Charter of Fundamental Rights. In the meantime, the Court of Justice is to take account of all these new provisions.

The debate on the review of the EU budget for the period post-2013 is the moment of truth as regards finding out if the four cornerstones laid down by the Lisbon Treaty to bolster the territorial dimension – territorial cohesion, subsidiarity, multilevel governance and public services – will come together and result in a budget that is up to the challenges posed by the current crises, a budget that makes sense not only in the eyes of national finance ministers but also, and above all, in light of the reality on the ground and people’s everyday experience. Particularly when it comes to the EU budget, history seems to repeat itself: calls to re-nationalise common policies – beginning with regional policy and the common agricultural policy are already being made. For this reason, the PES President, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, and I have written to President Barroso urging the Commission to adopt a resolutely ambitious stance on this issue.4 To do this, we hope that the Commission will ally itself with a strong European Parliament, bolstered by the legitimacy it derives directly from the people, by its independence from national governments and by the enhanced powers bestowed on it by the Lisbon Treaty. Because ultimately it is the political will of the Commission and the Parliament and not merely the Treaty alone that will help give new momentum to European integration, the need for which we all recognise. We, the socialist elected representatives at the Committee of the Regions, will help drive this momentum.

Endnotes

1 See the opinion of the Committee of the Regions on the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion, drawn up by Jean-Yves Le Drian, president of the Brittany regional council (PES/F), February 2009, CdR 274/2008.

2 Article 9 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union: ‘In defining and implementing its policies and actions, the Union shall take into account requirements linked to the promotion of a high level of employment, the guarantee of adequate social protection, the fight against social exclusion, and a high level of education, training and protection of human health.’

3 See the Committee of the Regions’ White Paper on multilevel governance, drawn up by Luc Van den Brande (EPP/BE) and Michel Delebarre (PES/F) in June 2009, CdR 89/2009.

4 http://www.cor.europa.eu/pesweb/pdf/lettera_Barroso_23_10_09.pdf.