How many members will the European Union have by, say, the year 2020?

With the latest round of enlargement not yet two months old, the exertions of the constitutional debate still straining the dedicated Europeanists, and prospective members largely a collection of the poor, ill-governed and recently-at-war, it would be reckless indeed to speculate about the who and when of future enlargements.

That’s exactly what blogs are for.

Having said as far back as 1994 that the EU would probably admit formerly communist countries when at least one of them could be a net contributor to the budget (Slovenia), I’m feeling good about this particular type of recklessness.

Under the fold, the EU’s path to 39 members (40 if Serbia and Montenegro divorce), along with the first European Parliament elections that I expect their citizens to be able to vote in.
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It seems that Doug’s informant was correct as a deal has been made and the new EU Consitution has been agreed, while any decision on the next Commission President has been deferred for a few weeks. Bertie Ahern is saying that he hopes it will be resolved by the end of the Irish Presidency, though.

Chris Patten, Jean-Claude Juncker and Guy Verhofstadt seem to have ruled themselves out of the running for the Presidency, with the remaining candidates seeming to be Ahern, Portuguese Commissioner Antonio Vitorino, outgoing European Parliament President Pat Cox and perennial multinational contender AN Other. I have no information to back this up other than a vague hunch, but I suspect that the search will finally end with Ahern ‘reluctantly’ leaving Dublin for Brussels.

Anyway, feel free to use this as an open thread for your thoughts on the Constitution and the Presidency.

Update: Bertie Ahern’s statement on the agreement can be found here and the agreement itself can be found here (PDF document)

A reasonably reliable source has given me some tips on outcomes expected from the current summit in Brussels:

* They will reach an agreement on the draft of the constitution. The European Parliament will have even more members, and the rules on qualified majorities will be sorted out.

* They will not agree on a successor to Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission. That decision will be put off until the third week of July.

It is not just my personal experience that many people’s opinions about the EU and its institutions are predominantly based on a political chicken and egg problem: No one knows what came first, ignorance or lack of interest; however, both do a great job in reinforcing each other.

A particularly eye-opening experience for me was the change of hearts of a conservative friend who is now a lonely Europhile in the Tory party. Only a couple of days of un-biased research for a paper about the EU and much of the previous Superstate rethoric had to become intellectually dishonest. Sure, institutional Europe does feature a certain, and often bemoaned “democratic deficit”. But more importantly, I’d say, Europe lacks citizens appreciating the importance of the democratic procedures already in place.

But this, I suggest, is much less the people’s fault than now suggested by the same media that usually avoids explaining the complexity and importance of European governance for our life; a little because many journalists have a hard time with complexity themselves, but more importantly, because the technocratic and rather invisible way politcs is done in Brussels – while appreciated by national politicians – does not make good tv.
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Elections to the European Parliament is tomorrow for some of you, the 13th for most of us. What party do you plan to vote for? (Will you vote?) Why?

This wouldn’t be the first time. Now, however, it’s not milk or potatoes that are at issue, but words.

An acute difficulty of excess verbiage has lead Neil kinnock to crack down and order that in future no Commission report should be more than 15 pages long, except in undefined rare circumstances. This compares with the present average of length of 32.

The reason for this change unfortunately is not the arrival of sound sense, but rather that of 10 new members.

“Officials at the European Commission produce a mountain of jargon-laden reports every year, some of them incomprehensible in any language.”

I’m not sure if verbal apoplexy is a fatal condition, or merely chronic: I shall have to check.

It had already been assumed that the European Commission and the Council of Ministers would go ahead with the EU-US airline data (PNR) transfer agreement (.pdf) despite the European Parliament’s decisison to wait for a Court of Justice ruling. But now Edward Hasbrouck has it in writing: according to a US Department of Homeland Security transcript of a joint press conference with US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, European Commissioner of Justice and Home Affairs, Antonio Vitorino apparently answered to the question whether he knew how to proceed if the court decision would (as expected) deem the EU-US agreement in violation of EU data protection regulations (and possibly in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights) –

“Well, first of all, I would like to clarify that the conclusion of this process has not yet been done. And this week, the Commission will take a decision on Wednesday. And next Monday, the Council of Ministers will take the final decision. I don’t want to anticipate those decisions, but likely those decisions will be in favor in the sense to go ahead with the adequacy finding statement and with the international agreement. That will most likely change the nature of the case, the court case, that has been raised by the Parliament. But I see no obstacles for the proceedings, according to what has been agreed, until the court takes a position in some time.”

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The race to become the next President of the European Commission got interesting yesterday.

Well, maybe not that interesting, but the announcement by European Parliament President Pat Cox that he would not be seeking re-election as an Irish MEP in June is widely agreed to be a signal that he’s interested in the other Presidency.

As this Independent article discusses, Cox doesn’t appear to be any government’s first choice for the job, though that could be a benefit rather than a hindrance as first choices often fall at the first hurdle in the horse-trading that determines who’ll get the Presidency.

(An interesting sidebar to the discussion is that the UK may block Jacques Chirac’s preferred choice – Belgian PM Verhofstadt – allowing the Daily Express to recycle it’s ‘Britain Blocks The Belgian’ headline from when John Major vetoed Jean-Luc Dehaene in 1994)

But, the most interesting part of these negotiations is that the results of next month’s European Parliament elections could have a decisive effect on who’s up for the job and who’s not. If the EPP and ELDR have a combined majority in the Parliament they may be able to insist on the appointment of Cox as Commission President which, I think, may be one of the more interesting developments in EU politics of recent times, in that it’ll mean the Commission has a President who owes his job as much to the Parliament (of which he is a 15-year veteran) as he does the member governments.

Sit back and watch – this could get interesting.

Bridging what is left of the Iron Curtain will not be easy. But that is always the case when great things are at stake. That – not tonight’s celebrations – is what Europeans, old and new, East and West, should remember when the road gets a little bumpy along the way.

Only a few minutes ago, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, and Lituania became members of the European Union! Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Malta will follow within the hour.

But as I have decided to celebrate the enlargement offline with some friends and a bottle of champagne I once lost to a Polish friend by insisting that 2004 would be too early for Polish membership, I will now act against my German instincts and welcome the remaining new-members-to-be about 30 minutes early – willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!