Make your mind up time for EU
How the EU does its business is changing rapidly, as the Union's new convention takes shape.
By July 18, the convention's chairman, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, will have completed his task, by depositing the complete text of the draft constitution in Rome.
He was given the huge task of preparing a document to guide the 46-year-old union of countries to its 100th anniversary.
The 15 member states may take years to deliberate over his recommendations. Nevertheless, it is likely that they will finally agree to scrap the notion of one country's veto holding up decisions, which will instead by decided by majority voting.
If that was the case last week, it is unlikely that the French would have been allowed to call a halt to the CAP talks in Luxembourg.
Instead, we would now have a CAP review agreed, with only 58% compensation for dairy price cuts of 28%.
If France was still unhappy, their only course might be the new convention "exit clause", to allow Member States to leave the Union.
Then again, the current CAP talks might not even have started yet, if the Giscard d'Estaing Convention was already in place.
Instead, the European Commission would still be trying to get their review proposals through the Parliament in Strasbourg because d'Estaing's plan would nearly double the Parliament's role in decision-making.
From 2009, if the former French president's Convention draft plan is adopted, EU decisions will be taken by double majority, representing at least half the Member States, but also representing 60% of the EU's total population. (Until 2009, complicated Nice Treaty rules will apply).
The "people" could have more say not just through a stronger Parliament, but also through referendum: a minimum of 1m EU citizens will have the right to demand the Commission to submit a proposal on matters where they believe the EU should act.
Agriculture Ministers should make the most of their upcoming Council meetings in Italy, which holds the EU presidency for the next six months. The Convention draft proposes to replace the unwieldy six-month rotating leadership with a longer-term EU presidency.
It is because of endless negotiations like the ongoing CAP talks that the Convention has been proposed. In recent years, the need to reform the EU and its Treaties has become more and more pressing, as bottlenecks in the policy-making process became clear, which could only be solved through the reform of the institutions.
Giscard d'Estaing's blueprint aims to streamline EU institutions and prevent decision-making gridlock when the 15-member bloc takes in another 10 mostly ex-communist states next May, expanding its population to 450 million.
Also, it has become evident that a gap was growing between the EU and its citizens, which needed to be addressed. The EU leaders therefore decided that the time has come for a profound debate on the objectives and goals of the EU, its Treaties and its institutions.
The results of that debate will be in place on July 18, in the form of a draft constitution.
But the citizens will have the final say. If they thought the Nice Treaty was a difficult referendum, the Convention referendum will be even more baffling.
There's nothing very complicated about its suggestion of an EU president with a term of two-and-a-half years. But citizens may find it hard to decide on, or even get interested in proposals such as co-decision, where Parliament and governments legislate together; or the extension of powers of initiative (in particular in the area of justice and home affairs) to the Commission; or strengthening of national parliaments by receiving full information rights and a new "early warning" mechanism that gives them direct access to the Union's legislative process.
Nevertheless, changes in these rules will be profound, and nowhere more so than in farming, the Irish activity which has always been most affected by goings-on in Brussels.
