- Why have you decided to produce your own draft Constitution?

I think that the Convention will succeed only when it gets down to drafting, and the sooner we can get down to drafting, the sooner we will succeed. In the first stages in the work of the Convention we have had a lot of speeches, and some especially from the Eastern countries have been very abstract. My experience of the Charter – where I served on the Convention as well – is that the sooner we get down to drafting, in fact it was only when we got down to drafting that we began to work and to forge the consensus that was needed. I am gradually releasing various articles of a Constitution for a Federal Union – gradually first because I want to stimulate interest but also because I have a fairly open mind on various aspects of the Constitution. The most tricky issues concern the powers of the institutions and the decision-making procedures, which we have not even broached properly yet in the debate in the Convention. These will be tackled once we have discussed the issues of missions, competences, and instruments, which are very necessary and important things that we needed to discuss before we got onto the struggle for powers, if you like. These are the issues of the greatest interest to many people including many people in the press, but are only part of the whole schema.

- One of the big questions is the delineation of competences. You have chosen to replace the concept of exclusive powers with that of “principal” powers. Why did you choose this system?

The canon of exclusive competences of the EU is extremely limited, and therefore restrictive. The EU does not have many, and that is not the way we have constructed the EU. We have constructed it on a regime of power-sharing between authorities, and that is not a classical federal construction. I want the competence question to be relatively fluid, relatively flexible, so that powers can flow up and down according to circumstances, economic, political, social, and so on. I think it would have been impossible to have drafted a classical federal catalogue, a list of all the powers vertical powers between the EU level and the member state level, and indeed, because we have so many federal states inside the EU, inside the member states as well. The variety between different member states and their internal arrangements is so great that it is not easy to get a consistency of approach. I think that even if you try to devise exclusive competences of the member states you would find there was controversy. Some member states think they have more exclusive powers than others. I wanted to avoid all that and try to paint a more impressionist picture in brighter colours, a bit blurred around the edges, so that people would see the general picture rather than a design for a mechanical engineering degree which would only have been understood by specialists.

- What role would you see for the member states in this arrangement?

Well they have an important role which has got to be respected, and one has to create a strong authority, a strong place for them where they have an assured role to play. Obviously the Council is it, and I mean it in that we do not want to create further institutions where they can interfere in the running of the Union. The big question is where does executive authority lie, and the answer is that it is going to be shared between the Council and the Commission. Obviously one wants to shift an awful lot of it from the Council, which interferes far too much at present, to the Commission which requires more executive authority if it is to be an efficient institution. But obviously the Council will retain some executive authority, and important executive authority, especially in the field of security, both internal and external security matters. It is a question of finding where the balance lies on that. I think that will be the single most tricky question that the Convention has to tackle.

- You include security and defence policy in your list of principal powers. Do you see this replacing national defence entirely?

I think that effectively we are dealing with common defence system at present, in that no member state is under an individual threat from any other individual country. We are used to collective defence, at least those of us in NATO are, and I do not think that it is credible, frankly, for a member of a federal Union to cling on to luxurious positions of neutrality, which some of the member states of the EU still try to claim. They have this rather contrived position, for reasons we know, but they are all old-fashioned reasons, and it is not credible that this should be permissible within a federal Union. An attack on any part of the territory of the Union is an assault on the whole Union.

- You have chosen the term Federal Union, rather than the alternatives of federation, federation of nation-states, United States of Europe, and so on. What do you mean by that formulation?

Well you will see it when you see the whole of the Constitution – I am not seeking to dodge the question, but I want to the whole shape to emerge in its fully-fledged form a bit later on. But I certainly think that the phrase of Federal Union would not suggest that we would become like the USA, in other words a centralised superstate superpower. We can improve on that. The much greater diversity of culture, of nationality, inside the European Union compared to that of the United States, suggests that we are not going to achieve that, even if we wanted to achieve that, which personally I do not. And then we have phrases such as “federation of nation states” which I am simply unable to understand. On the whole they are from francophones, I have never since Monnet passed away met a Frenchman who was a sound federal thinker, and even Monnet was ambiguous concerning the use of this word. So we have to find a form of words which describes precisely what it is we are trying to create. I hope that Federal Union of the states and peoples describes what it is.

- Would you for example see this Federal Union having unified external representation, for example, a single seat in the UN instead of separate member state representation?

I think that they could exist in transitional period in parallel, for example at the General Assembly of the United Nations, joint delegations of MPs from national parliaments and the European Parliament, but in the Security Council we should act with a single voice. Of course in a reformed Security Council, at present we have two seats on the Permanent Security Council and I am not proposing that we sacrifice the second for a single EU seat, that would be idiotic. But we must act with a single voice in world affairs.

That is not to say that there are not some special interests of individual countries which can be carried on in consistency with the Common Foreign and Security Policy. We each have, most of us have special relations with former colonies, etc., and these should be allowed for under the construction of a common policy.

- That would make it distinctive from existing federal states where the central authority has exclusive competence in this field?

Yes, I think in several respects this would be a unique construction.

- What kind of feeling do you have in the Convention about prospects for moves in this direction?

I think it is going very well, the debate has been very rich and informed, and there is clearly a great ambition for success and to build a strong consensus in the Convention. I think that there is certainly agreement that the competence of the EU in the Common Foreign and Security Policy and in Defence needs to be extended, the instruments have not been discussed, but on the principle there is a very strong feeling. Other agreement includes the abolition of the third pillar which in any case has basically collapsed. There is a lot of sense that we are going in the right direction.

- There have been many reports of the member states trying to pre-empt the Convention or that they may try to undermine its work. Is that something that you are concerned about?

No, they will meet and of course they have to meet, but they will find it a problem to agree. I think they will find it impossible to agree with each other outside the Convention, and inside the Convention they do not have to. If we go back to the old IGC, it did not work last time, so why should it work this time? It is only through the pluralisation of the debate we can create a fresh consensus.

- Do you feel that the Convention has changed agenda even of the member states’ discussions?

That is quite right. The pressure from the Convention is working its magic.

- Are you concerned about what the European Council might do afterwards?

That is the question, but in a sense they will be trapped in the Convention. We will champion the work of the Convention in the work of the IGC, we need everyone to do that, including President Giscard d’Estaing who is a formidable performer. He will be very good at marketing the conclusions of the Convention.

Interview conducted by Alison Weston

Andrew Duff’s draft articles can be found on the Convention website:

Second contribution CONV 57/02: http://european-convention.eu.int/doc_register.ASP?MAX=21&LANG=EN&Content=CONTR

First contribution CONV 22/02: http://european-convention.eu.int/doc_register.ASP?MAX=41&LANG=EN&Content=CONTR