Professor Federico Fabbrini:

I thank both Deputies for their insightful questions. I will try to address all of the points they raised with three quick answers from my side. Deputy Calleary raised the issue of the delay in the process and the timeframe in that regard going forward. The expectation has always been that the German Council Presidency would be in the position to launch the conference.

Many in the European Parliament and the Commission hoped that this would be the case. As it is now 11 November, I am not 100% sure that it will happen because of the challenges with the pandemic which Professor Barrett mentioned.

I want to bring the outcome of the latest Council of Ministers in the French Government on 4 November to the attention of the committee. The French Government has already put forward, in French, a communication on the plans for France's Presidency of the EU Council in the first semester of 2022, which is a little over a year from now. The French Government has been adamant in saying that it will close the Conference on the Future of Europe on its watch. That injects some optimism that the process will not be dragged on forever and that we will have time to finalise this initiative and make it more concrete.

Regarding the role of the institutions of the European Council and Parliament, I mentioned in my study for the AFCO community that I think the intergovernmental trends at play in the EU system of governance are worrying and have to be tackled. What we have witnessed over the last decade is a major difficulty for the European Union in addressing its crises, including the euro crisis, the migration crisis and now the rule of law crisis, the environmental crisis, the issue of enlargement and, of course, the pandemic. Decisions on these issues have to be taken exclusively in intergovernmental fora. The EU needs intergovernmental fora but the genius of the original EU constitutional architecture was that intergovernmentalism was balanced out with supranational features. We need to rediscover that equilibrium and that is why institutional questions need to be part of the plan for the Conference on the Future of Europe.

I thank Deputy Richmond for his questions on this third point. The Conference on the Future of Europe mirrors or reminds us to some extent of prior initiatives like the Messina Conference or the Convention on the Future of Europe 20 years ago. Deputy Richmond rightly stated that the convention ended up being a failure. The treaty establishing a constitution for Europe never entered into force and we had to opt for a back-up solution in the Lisbon Treaty. That is precisely why we should be thinking about technical but important issues like treaty changes or the procedures we need to put in place to make sure the Conference on the Future of Europe does not fail. The experience 20 years ago with the Convention on the Future of Europe was that we started discussing substantive issues but we did not really tackle how to make sure those constitutional innovations could enter into force. I agree with what Dr. Day said about focusing on the substance, what the conference is good for and what important reforms we need to introduce because citizens asked for them. However, and perhaps I am biased because I am an EU lawyer and see myself as a technician in this, it is crucial that we as elite are also mindful of the institutional challenges connected to this process. We must make sure we design the conference in such a way that we prevent an expected failure, which would almost certainly be the case if we were to run into the process of treaty amendment.