The Commission Proposes and Nothing Happens Yet

The European Commission will propose something this week, and the coverage will report that the European Union has decided it. Between those two sentences lie about two years and three institutions.

The Commission's distinctive power is that it alone may propose. Neither the Parliament nor the Council can generally introduce legislation of its own; they may request a proposal, and the Commission may decline.

The Commission's account of how it drafts describes what precedes a proposal: consultation, an impact assessment, and internal agreement among the departments affected. By the time a text is published it has already survived a long internal argument.

That is the source of the confusion. A proposal arrives polished, presented at a press conference by a commissioner, and it looks exactly like a decision. It is a first draft with an author.

The functioning treaty sets out what happens to it in article 294, under the name the ordinary legislative procedure, which governs most Union law including the single market, the environment and consumer protection.

The proposal goes simultaneously to two bodies. The Parliament, directly elected, and the Council, made up of national ministers, and both must agree on an identical text before anything becomes law.

Parliament's guide to the procedure describes the first reading. Parliament adopts a position, which may accept the proposal, amend it heavily, or rewrite it. The Council then either approves Parliament's text, in which case the act is adopted, or adopts a position of its own.

the Council's description of its own half adds the detail that decides most outcomes: the Council generally acts by qualified majority, meaning fifty-five per cent of member states representing sixty-five per cent of the population.

That threshold explains why single-country opposition rarely stops a file, and why coalitions of four or five large states routinely do. The arithmetic of blocking minorities is the real politics of Brussels.

If the two institutions differ, a second reading follows with fixed deadlines, and if that fails a conciliation committee of equal numbers from each side has six weeks to produce a joint text, which both must then approve or the file dies.

In practice most files never reach that stage, because of a device the treaties do not describe. Negotiators from Parliament, Council and Commission meet privately in what everyone calls a trilogue, and settle the text before first reading concludes.

Trilogues are efficient and they are where the substance is decided. They are also the least visible part of the process, conducted without published minutes, which is the standing criticism of the whole arrangement.

Then there is the matter of what kind of act is being proposed. A regulation applies directly in every member state on the date it enters force. A directive binds states as to the result and leaves them to legislate their own way there.

The difference is usually two years and considerable variation. A directive agreed in Brussels produces twenty-seven national statutes, each drafted by a different parliament, and the practical law in Ireland may differ substantially from the practical law in Poland.

Even a regulation typically carries a delayed application date, so that businesses and national regulators can prepare, which means the rules people eventually notice often arrive three or four years after the announcement that reported them.

This is why reading a Commission proposal as settled policy produces such consistent errors. The proposal is the most ambitious version of the text that will ever exist; the enacted version is what survived two institutions and twenty-seven governments.

It is equally a mistake to treat a proposal as noise. The Commission's monopoly on initiative means the agenda is set by whoever drafts, and issues outside the proposal are outside the debate entirely.

The useful discipline is to note three dates for any file: the proposal, the general approach in the Council and the Parliament's position, and the final adoption.

The gap between the first and the second is where lobbying lands. The gap between the second and the third is where the compromises are made, and it is where the headline commitments usually lose their sharpest edges.

So the correct reading of this week's announcement is that a negotiation has opened with a published opening position. What the Union has decided is that the subject is now on the table.