"Europe begins at home" – this is the motto of a two-day, high-level EU conference on subsidiarity in St. Pölten, which was opened today by the Governor of Lower Austria, Erwin Pröll. Members of parliament from all 25 EU countries and from the acceding countries Bulgaria and Romania will discuss, together with experts and representatives of the European Commission and the European Parliament, a better division of labour between the European Union on the one hand and the national and regional level on the other.
The agenda includes debates on the role of the national parliaments in the European Union, the contribution that can be made by the regions and local authorities, and the link between subsidiarity and 'better regulation', which is an EU initiative geared to improving the quality of legislation and cutting red tape. The speakers include Josep Borrell-Fontelles, the President of the European Parliament, Günter Verheugen, Vice-President of the European Commission, Vassilios Skouris, President of the European Court of Justice and Dimitrij Rupel, the Foreign Minister of Slovenia.
The conference, which is a joint initiative by the Austrian Parliament, the Federal Chancellery and the Government of the Bundesland Lower Austria, is a follow-up to a conference held in The Hague in November 2005 on "Sharing Power in Europe: Striking the right balance between EU and Member State action". The objective is to draw up recommendations for the European Council in June 2006.
One of the issues up for discussion is a proposal by Andreas Khol, President of Austria’s National Council, to use the possibilities already existing to apply in practice now those parts of the EU Constitutional Treaty that give national parliaments a greater say in the EU legislative process. The aim is not, as Khol stressed in the run-up to the conference, to cherry-pick certain parts of the Constitutional Treaty and implement them before the Treaty itself is adopted, but to apply the subsidiarity principle more effectively on the basis of the Amsterdam Treaty. According to Khol, the Amsterdam Treaty has already incorporated the principle of an appropriate division of tasks into the European legal system, but there have been complaints that the EU tended not to deal with the "big issues" but concerned itself too much with local matters. "We are not satisfied with what is happening in practice."
Khol hopes the conference will initiate a political dialogue on what can most effectively be dealt with by the EU and what should be left to the national and regional parliaments, the national parliaments being the "guardians of subsidiarity". Among other things, he would like the national parliaments to carry out a “pre-screening” of draft EU legislative proposals in order to ascertain whether they contain any unnecessary, centralistic regulations. Khol considers that a specific checklist could be drawn up for this purpose.
Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and the Governor of Lower Austria, Erwin Pröll, also spoke at the press conference of the need to take seriously public concern about a “creeping centralisation” of the EU. The regions needed to be strengthened to provide a counterweight, Schüssel stressed: "we are striving to achieve a new balance and a new relationship". Pröll said a “subsidiarity culture” had to be developed throughout Europe to preserve a multi-facetted, colourful Europe. To bring this about, the central authorities “had to be able to let go".
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