EU trade policy: Pascal Lamy hopes for Commission firmness

In an exclusive interview with Borderlex, the former WTO director general, who has also served as European Union trade commissioner and as chef de cabinet of Jacques Delors, architect of the EU’s single market, shared some of his views on the current politics of trade in Brussels. One of his key concerns is the Commission’s ability to handle member state pressures and TTIP politics in a ‘post-Lisbon’ environment.

The European Commission has not sufficiently faced down member states trying to wrangle power away from Brussels since the Lisbon treaty came into force five years ago. It also mishandled so far the politics of TTIP, Pascal Lamy told Borderlex.

“I wrote the trade part of the Lisbon treaty myself”, Lamy quips in his high-ceilinged, wood-parqueted, office at the Jacques Delors Institute headquarters, the Parisian base from which he continues to act as political advisor in his new career after eight years at the helm of the World Trade Organization. The text that organises the functioning of the European Union since late 2009 shifted a great deal of powers away from the member states to Brussels. Its first version was finalised in 2004, the year Lamy’s term as trade commissioner ended.

The EU’s constitutional text introduced important changes in the EU’s common commercial policy: foreign direct investment became an exclusive EU competence, and the European parliament obtained co-decision powers, in other words the right to decide on equal terms with the member states on trade.

Many in Brussels criticise the members of the European parliament for not being technically competent enough on trade. Others worry about excessive politicisation of EU trade policy. But the parliament’s enhanced powers are a development Lamy welcomes – a view that could surprise some who remember him as an iron-fisted technocrat implementing ruthlessly Delors’ agenda.

Enhancing the EU Parliament’s powers? “It had to be done,” Lamy said. “On issues which are so sensitive for public opinion, you cannot move this out of national parliaments and put it in a limbo. You have to put it somewhere where there is democratic scrutiny”.

The Frenchman, who met the elected body’s trade committee in private last January, praised it: “there were a number of good old trade wonks still there, and the level of questions raised by different groups were from well-informed people”, he told of this behind-closed-doors encounter. He also noted that the MEP’s level of expertise is increasing, compared to the time when he was in charge of trade policy at the Commission.

Soft in his judgement on the parliament, Lamy is hard on the Commission

 

http://www.borderlex.eu/eu-trade-policy-pascal-lamy-hopes-commission-firmness/