Dutch presidency ends as MEPs gain power

BLINK, it seems, and another presidency is over and it's time for another post-mortem.

It's difficult not to feel sorry for the Dutch. They were not dealt a kind hand a British and a French election, and a crisis of authority in Bonn - and at the last minute the Germans played a trump card from another game. Domestic politics, and not Dutch-willing, scuppered the ambition of Amsterdam.

Perhaps they knew it from the start - the Dutch presidency symbol was the EU's traditional circle of 12 yellow stars, each linked by a small humpbacked bridge. The intention was to symbolise unity, but all it ever reminded me of was that subject of endless EU negotiations, the fur-trader's barbaric leghold trap.

The Dutch still had vivid memories of their last attempt to broker a treaty. Only weeks before the Maastricht agreement was due to be signed they produced a draft text whose level of federalising ambition astounded even their closest allies. In a humiliating about-face they were forced to tear it up and return to a previous Luxembourg draft.

This time they would not make the same mistake. Ambition would be constrained by realism. Above all they would ensure that Amsterdam produced a treaty even though, only days before-hand, veterans of Maastricht were privately warning that they had been considerably more advanced at that point in the earlier treaty negotiations.

But they made it, despite the huge complexity involved in incorporating Schengen into the treaty and the late start on the final stretch necessitated by the British election. That the level of ambition should be so reduced this time can be blamed fairly and squarely on the Germans, whose last-minute volte-face on the extension of majority voting enraged those hoping the summit would clear the way for enlargement.

Mr Max Kohnstamm, a former collaborator with the founder of the European Community, Jean Monnet, observed afterwards that the failure at Amsterdam showed that the EU cannot be built, even incrementally, by politicians with little room for domestic manoeuvre.

Sources close to the Inter-Governmental Conference may quibble about the extent to which - perhaps in the name of disabusing the cynics who say the Dutch don't listen - they allowed issues to be revisited in the talks once they had appeared to be settled but in reality it appears that the Dutch made only one miscalculation.

In proposing a re-weighting of votes in the Council of Ministers to compensate larger member-states for their potential loss of a second commissioner, the Dutch, who have only one Commissioner, awarded themselves another two votes, putting them ahead of Belgium. This may have been mathematically justifiable, but politically it was foolish, and led to a predictable explosion from the Belgian Prime Minister, Mr Jean Luc Dehaene.

The miscalculation reflected, a colleague suggested, the Dutch perception that they are "not the largest of the small countries, but the smallest of the European powers. The former, he points out with some truth, tend to subsume their own interests during their presidencies into the collective interests of the union, while the larger states do not hesitate to fight their own corner.

On other fronts the Dutch had a quiet presidency with little on the legislative agenda. They brokered a deal on the controversial fourth fisheries programme and only last week reached an important agreement at the Environment Council on the quality of oil and petrol.

Most crucially, they kept the economic and monetary bandwagon rolling on course, despite French and German sideshows.

On foreign policy they were less sure-footed, with the Foreign Minister, Mr Hans van Mierlo, having to beat a hasty retreat when he presumed too much of France's humanitarian concern for the Chinese.

Next week they pass the baton on to the Luxembourgers.

Meanwhile it is important to give credit where credit is due and rectify one significant omission in our coverage of Amsterdam. There was indeed one significant group which gained - MEPs.

Although there is still a small row going on about what exactly was agreed, in broad outline it is clear: apart from a significant simplification of the legislative procedure, MEPs have won the right to legislate jointly with the Council of Ministers ("co-decision") in 23 new fields, including transport, anti-fraud policies and public health.

They have been given unprecedented control over the budget for foreign and security policy and the power to veto the appointment of Commission presidents. And they have gained the right to prepare proposals for a common electoral system for elections to the parliament in all 15 member-states.

The product of a careful strategy of wooing member-states with a modest programme of demands, the parliament's success means that "Amsterdam has given it more powers than Maastricht", points out Mr Elmar Brok, the German Christian Democrat who represented MEPs as an observer on the IGC.