Zweeds voorzitterschap wil knopen doorhakken op Europese top in oktober (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Sweden is hoping to clear up the EU's distracting institutional issues in one grand summit next month in order to drag the union's focus back to pressing international issues.
Speaking to MEPs on Tuesday (1 September) Cecilia Malmstrom i, Sweden's Europe minister, said: "Our aim is - if everything goes smoothly and the Lisbon treaty is adopted - that at the October council ...we can decide on all the institutional issues."
The gathering of EU leaders at the end of next month should appoint the new list of commissioners, the new EU foreign minister and the president of the European Council.
According to Mrs Malstrom, the summit should also agree a "loose framework" for the EU's fledgling diplomatic service.
The minister was responding to a series of questions from euro-deputies in the constitutional committee on how the Lisbon treaty – which faces a referendum in Ireland on 2 October and final approval in three other countries – should function in practice.
Deputies raised concerns about whether the new foreign minister will be subject to some parliamentary oversight; what the exact powers of the EU president will be and how this person should interact with the presidency countries that will continue to do the basic day-to-day running of the union.
Mrs Malmstrom admitted that many issues remain unclear, not least because the Swedish presidency cannot openly canvass opinion among member states on some of the sensitive questions, in case they are accused of pre-empting the result of the Irish referendum.
It plans to conduct "extensive discussions" on the scope of the new diplomatic service, the role of the EU president and the functioning of the future rotating presidencies as soon after the Irish vote as possible, if it results in a Yes.
Brussels has for months been preoccupied with questions about who is to fill the new posts and what sort of new squabbles they might bring to the crowded EU scene, although climate change and the economic crisis are nominally top of the EU's to-do list.
With the EU having a well established tradition of scrapping noisily and at length over titles and posts and who should get them, Mrs Malmstrom chided MEPs for being too concerned with arcane institutionalia.
"We tend to focus a little too much on institutional issues and too little on issues that are of real concern for the daily life of the citizen. They are concerned about having a job or not," she said.
In this spirit, she also urged MEPs to vote this month on Jose Manuel Barroso i's bid to become European Commission president for a second time, rather than dragging out the decision until October, as some have threatened to do.
"We think that these extraordinary times of very, very big economic crisis and climate change on the agenda demands European leadership. We need strong European institutions and we need to take the lead globally," the minister said.