EU foreign ministers yesterday gave the nod to a substantial extension of the remit of the current treaty-changing Intergovernmental Conference (IGC).
They agreed that next week's EU summit at Feira, in Portugal, will mandate the IGC to consider how to make the treaty's "flexibility" provisions easier to operate and hence to allow groups of member-states to undertake projects of their own within the EU framework without the participation of the reluctant.
At a severely depleted meeting in Luxembourg, with five ministers away at President Assad's funeral, there was no outright opposition to the move to expand the IGC agenda, but the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, is understood to have warned that any such ventures must be in keeping with EU objectives.
Ireland and others will also watch carefully to see that there is no upsetting of the crucial institutional balance which protects the rights of small member-states.
The IGC had been mandated to deal exclusively with the so-called leftovers from Amsterdam - the number of commissioners, the reduction in veto voting, and the weighting of votes in the Council of Ministers.
But some member-states, notably led by the Commission President, Mr Romano Prodi, have argued that the enlargement of the EU makes it critical that the flexibility provisions established in the Treaty of Amsterdam, and very restrictively framed, should be loosened up so that the EU's development is not to be determined by the pace of the slowest in the convoy.
The focus of the IGC is likely to be on eliminating the "safety brake" provision which effectively allows any member-state to veto a project, and on the number of member-states, probably half the total, required for any separate project to be undertaken within the EU framework.
But speaking yesterday to The Irish Times for an interview to be published shortly, the French Minister for European Affairs, Mr Pierre Moscovici, made clear that they were also interested in simplifying decision-making within any such group. Mr Moscovici would not elaborate on how he would achieve this beyond saying that each group should be able to decide for itself how it functioned.
