Luxembourg compromise

French President Charles de Gaulle, pictured in 1961

Whereas the founding fathers of the EEC (Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet) were avowed European integrationists, Charles de Gaulle was a French nationalist. In 1960 de Gaulle believed that a council of the heads of government should be created with a secretariat in Paris. He desired a European institution that would give France greater power in Europe. He also sought to create a political union to further the economic union already in existence, the European Economic Community. This was his second attempt at creating more political coordination in Europe, the first being a Franco-Italian proposal that would have required that foreign ministers met outside the EEC structures regularly. The Dutch were quick to block that proposal, preferring to keep any political union talks within the Western European Union.[1]

The West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer met with de Gaulle in July 1960 where de Gaulle presented a nine-point plan entitled "A Note on the Subject of the Organization of Europe". In this plan, de Gaulle proposed a diminished supranational influence and an end to the American-led integration.[1] It soon became apparent to the other five members of the EEC that de Gaulle was planning on creating a political union that would cut out not only American influence but British influence as well. Moreover, it would reconfigure the existing EEC institutions. The plan would call for regular summits, a parliament consisting of representatives from each of the member states' parliaments, and a national referendum.[2]

The other five were interested in a political union, but they expressed concern about the new configuration. Chancellor Adenauer reluctantly agreed to the plan, as long as provisions could be included which would keep NATO in Europe and preserve the existing EEC organs.[3] Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns was resistant to this new reorganisation, fearing that the exclusion of the United Kingdom and NATO would leave Europe vulnerable. Moreover, de Gaulle's plans would have meant a far more intergovernmental Europe, in which the majority of the power would rest with member states and not in supranational organisations. This would have meant a step backwards for European integration. Luns saw de Gaulle as an aspiring hegemon seeking to expand French influence throughout the continent. De Gaulle was clearly trying to increase French power: "Europe is the means for France to recover what it ceased to be after Waterloo: first in the world".[1]

Furthermore, the Dutch were concerned that leaving the United Kingdom out of Europe was irresponsible, but de Gaulle was vehemently opposed to the United Kingdom’s accession to the community. In his eyes, it would create a backdoor for NATO and the United States to involve themselves in Europe. Moreover, the UK would interfere with de Gaulle’s plans for "La Grande Nation": France as a superpower standing between the United States and the USSR.[2]

In October 1960, de Gaulle sent his prime minister to West Germany and was successful in getting Adenauer to agree to a heads of state meeting to take place in February 1961. Adenauer was mistrustful of de Gaulle, rightfully believing that de Gaulle was trying to create a "leading role for France in Europe" and combined with the Dutch opinion, led to the meeting being a failure for de Gaulle. It was agreed, however, that a committee should be formed to discuss possible political union".[1]

In autumn 1961, a committee was formed to address plans for a political union in Europe. The Fouchet Committee, named after Christian Fouchet, drafted a plan that would include defence among other political recourses. Any mention of NATO was conspicuously left out. While West Germany and Italy generally accepted the plan, provided that the NATO issue could be worked out, it was again the Dutch who opposed the plan. They also wanted to link any discussion on a political union with British accession to the EEC. France of course was opposed.[1]

Sensing that he had support of at least 3 member states, West Germany, Italy, and France, de Gaulle shifted tactics and he reissued the Fouchet Plan in January 1962. This plan again omitted NATO and sent a clear message that de Gaulle wanted to separate Europe from NATO. This move irritated the other members, including Italy and West Germany and strengthened the Dutch position".[1]

De Gaulle backtracked and in February 1962 went to West Germany to appeal to Adenauer. He reintroduced the omitted NATO passage to placate the Chancellor, but Adenauer did not want a Franco-German domination. De Gaulle was less timid, "Once (France and West Germany) are in agreement, their decision should be imposed".[1] Adenauer again changed his position, but the Dutch and Belgians would not tolerate de Gaulle’s plan. The issue was dropped at the April summit.

In July 1965, intergovernmentalist Charles de Gaulle boycotted European institutions due to issues he had regarding new political proposals by the European Commission. This event, known as the "Empty Chair Crisis", affected the European Community. Several issues regarding European political integration led to the confrontation. De Gaulle believed that national governments should move towards integration and did not agree with the Commission's attempt to create a shift towards supranationalism, extending powers beyond national borders.

After the failure of the Fouchet Plan and de Gaulle's veto of the United Kingdom's application for EC membership, the Commission attempted to move towards integration by proposing an idea that would combine the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the European Parliament, and Commission. De Gaulle supported the creation of the CAP and favoured its enactment. However, he disagreed with the Parliament's new role, the Commission's strength, the shift towards supranationalism, and the budget proposals for financing the CAP. De Gaulle made it a condition that majority voting with a right to veto must exist if France was to participate in the European Community. When de Gaulle was not granted a more intergovernmental Commission or voting and veto rights, the French representative left the Council of Ministers.[4]

The Luxembourg Compromise is viewed as a turning of the tide in the history of European integration. It safeguarded the intergovernmental nature of the EC, therefore preserving state sovereignty. It also prevented the EC from further consolidating power and therefore becoming more supranational, or taking power out of the hands of the states. This meant the EC was moving in the opposite direction of the original assumption that it "would eventually transform itself into a fully-fledged state".[17] Instead, a norm developed in the Council that all decisions should be taken unanimously. Although the Luxembourg Compromise was only formally invoked around ten times between 1966 and 1981, its "shadow" hung over the Council and made decision-making much more difficult.[18] Today, although majority voting has come to be used more frequently and the Luxembourg Compromise is all but defunct, the member states still prefer to take decisions by unanimity, because a decision reached by consensus means national authorities are more likely to implement EU directives into national law with enthusiasm, vigor, and in a timely manner.[19]

The Luxembourg compromise was, in fact, not a compromise: it was an agreement to disagree. Whereas all Member States accepted that, in a situation where a Member State's important national interests were at stake, an attempt should be made to find a solution acceptable to all, they did not agree to what should happen if no such solution was found within a reasonable period of time. France considered that the discussions should continue indefinitely. All other Member States took the view that a vote should be taken in accordance with the treaties.

In practice, in the years following the Luxembourg compromise, very little qualified majority voting took place in Council. This was partly due to a reluctance to force a new crisis with France, but the tendency was reinforced in 1973 by the accession of new Member States who essentially shared the French view on these matters.

Together, France, the UK and Denmark constituted a large enough minority to prevent decisions even by a qualified majority. In other words, if a matter were put to the vote against the express national interests of any Member State, it would not get through as these countries would not vote for a proposal in such circumstances. It therefore became habitual to negotiate on all texts, virtually line by line, until all member States agreed, before taking a decision in Council.

By the 1980s, this working method was coming under increasing strain. A number of negative consequences were becoming increasingly apparent:

• Such a decision-making procedure was grossly inefficient (it took 17 years, for instance, to agree on a directive on the mutual recognition of the qualifications for architects)
• Virtually any policy or action could only be the lowest common denominator acceptable to all members
• The Commission's right of initiative, and the role of the European Parliament, were reduced
• Such detailed and time-consuming negotiations could not be carried out by Ministers alone, but by national civil servants, which led to a bureaucratisation of the whole Community system

Above all, it became apparent that, while unanimity when agreeing on new Community policies was one thing, unanimity for the management or revision of existing Community policies was another. In these cases, the Community as a whole had a vital interest in ensuring that it could take rapid decisions, but it was clear that national ministers were quite capable of deeming almost anything to be an 'important national interest' when their state had an advantage in the status quo. CAP reforms for instance, were all too easy to block by any Member State gaining from the system, even when this was at huge expense to the Community as a whole. This applied in varying degrees to all Community policies and to all Member States. The right of veto proved to be the dictatorship of the minority, used for selfish national interests.

The first major crack in the practice of unanimity came in 1982 when the UK attempted to block the final adoption of the annual package of farm prices (details of which it had already agreed to) to extract concessions in separate negotiations on the Community's budget. This was perceived by other Member States to be almost a form of blackmail. The Community had to decide urgently on the agricultural prices for that year, and Britain was not objecting to the contents of that decision but merely using its supposed right of veto to extract concessions on another matter. This attitude provoked a sufficient majority of member states – including France – to take part in a vote openly putting Britain in a minority, and adopting the package. This was possible because the "bottom line", constitutionally, was the treaty provision for majority voting in this area, rather than the political understanding (and a disputed one at that) of the Luxembourg Compromise.

A shift in the attitude of some Member States was confirmed in 1983, on the occasion of the adoption of the Solemn Declaration on European Union by the European Council in Stuttgart. The Declaration itself referred to a need to improve the Community's capacity to act by applying the decision-making procedures laid down in the treaties. In declarations appended to the minutes, however, each Member State laid down its interpretation of when a vote should take place. Only Britain and Denmark supported the original French position of 1965. France and Ireland now spelt out that the national interest in question must relate directly to the subject under discussion and they, like Greece, took the view that the vote should only be postponed if a Member State invokes an '"essential" national interest "in writing". Belgium, West Germany, Luxembourg, Italy and the Netherlands took the view that a vote should be held whenever the treaties provide for it.

In 1984, the European Parliament put forward a proposal for a new treaty on European Union, which envisaged the introduction, over a ten-year period, of majority voting without the right of veto for all existing Community policies (except foreign-policy co-operation), but retained unanimity for the introduction of new policies. The response of the Member States, in the form of the Single European Act, was to extend by ten the number of articles in the treaties which required majority voting. This extension was linked for the most part to policy objectives (such as the legislative harmonisations necessary for completing the internal market by 1992), and the follow-up of unanimously-agreed framework decisions (e.g. individual research programmes, following the unanimous adoption of the multi-annual framework for research; and Regional Fund decisions, following the unanimous adoption of the overall regulation for the structural funds).

A change in the treaties could not in itself affect the Luxembourg compromise, as a political agreement with no legal basis, let alone a treaty one. Indeed, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared to the House of Commons that it remained. However, such a change to the treaties, duly ratified by all national parliaments, changed the constitutional framework within which the decisions concerned would be taken, and signified at least an intention to take majority votes more frequently. There would, after all, be little point in modifying the treaties if this were not the case.

The Council followed up this treaty change with an amendment to its internal Rules of Procedure. After a year of negotiations, it agreed in 1987 to change its rules to oblige the President-in Office to move to a vote upon the request of the Commission or the representative of any Member State, provided that the request is supported by a simple majority of Member States. The context was also changed by accession of Spain and Portugal to the European Community. It was no longer clear that states seeking to invoke the Luxembourg compromise would have sufficient support in Council to constitute a blocking minority.

Following these developments there was reluctance by Member States to risk invoking the compromise and finding it was not accepted. There were even cases in which Member States in the minority, rather than invoke the Luxembourg compromise during a vote, have challenged it in the Court of Justice on grounds of an incorrect legal basis – arguing that an article requiring unanimity should have been used. Gradually, votes were taken on increasingly controversial subjects such as a ban on hormones in meat (leading to a 'trade war' with the United States), permitted radioactivity levels in foodstuffs, rules for trans-frontier television broadcasts, several fishing controversies, foreign aid, and some of the crucial reforms of the CAP. By the time of the negotiation of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1991, it was widely recognised that votes would be taken wherever the treaty provided for it.

• Camps, M. (1964). The six and politícal union. The World Today, 20(1), 473–80.
• Cini, Michelle and Nieves Perez-Solorzano Borragan (eds.). European Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Corbett, Richard; 'The European Parliament's Role in Closer European Integration', London, Macmillan (1998)ISBN 0-333-72252-3 and New York, St Martin's Press (1998) ISBN 0-312-21103-1. Reprinted in paperback by Palgrave, London (2001) ISBN 0-333-94938-2
• De Gaulle's First Veto: France, the Rueff Plan and the Free Trade Area Frances. M. B. Lynch, Contemporary European History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Mar. 2000), pp. 111–135.
• Garrett, Geoffrey. 1995. "From the Luxembourg Compromise to Codecision: Decision Making in the European Union. " Electoral Studies 14 (3):289–308.
• Golub, Johnathan. 1999. "In the Shadow of the Vote? Decision Making in the European Community." International Organization 53:733–764.
• Ludlow, N. Piers. 2005. "The Making of CAP: Towards a Historical Analysis of the EU’s First Major Policy." Contemporary European History 14:347–371.
• Ludlow, N. Piers, Challenging French Leadership in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the Outbreak of the Empty Chair Crisis of 1965–1966. In: Contemporary European History. Vol 8(2).
• Luxembourg compromise bulletin (https://web.archive.org/web/20150610220051/http://www.eurotreaties.com/luxembourg.pdf)
• Moravcsik, Andrew. 2000. "De Gaulle Between Grain and Grandeur: The Political Economy of French EC Policy, 1958–1970 (Part 2)." Journal of Cold War Studies 2:4–68.
• Nicholl, W. 1984. "The Luxembourg Compromise." Journal of Common Market Studies 23: 35–44.
• Palayret, Jean Marie, Wallace, Helen, and Winand, Pascualine. Visions, Votes, and Vetoes: The Empty Chair Crisis and the Luxembourg Compromise Forty Years Later." Brussels, Belgium: P.I.E-Peter Lang, 2006.
• Spaak, P. (1965). A new effort to build Europe. Foreign Affairs, 43(2), 199–208.
• Teasdale, Anthony. 1993. "The Life and Death of the Luxembourg Compromise." Journal of Common Market Studies, 31(4), 567–579.
• Vanke, J. (2001). An impossible union: Dutch objections to the Fouchet plan, 1959–62 . Cold War History, 2(1), 95–113.