ABSTRACT
The European Convention is a new agenda-setting method for drafting reform proposals of a widening and deepening European Union (EU), which encompasses 25 member states and has jurisdiction in vital policy areas, such as social, labor, monetary and defense policies (Dinan 2002). However, the obsolete institutional framework of the EU, originally designed for six founding members, risks gridlock in decision making (König and Bräuninger 2004, Tsebelis in this volume). Without having used the conventional agenda-setting method, previous reform attempts at the Amsterdam (1996) and Nice (2000) summits failed due to incommensurate conflicts between large and smaller, rich and poorer countries, more and less integrationists actors. After marathon summit negotiations, the governmental delegates always postponed institutional reform and revised the treaties on the lowest common denominator (Gray and Stubb 2001). Furthermore, summit outcomes sometimes failed to receive sufficient approval in the domestic arena, such as recently in the Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty (2001). The Convention agenda-setting method attempts to anticipate the constraints of the following stages of constitution building by the inclusion of the preferences of governmental and parliamentary delegates. While the governments have to agree on a text at the following summit, parliamentary actors must ratify the proposal in the member states. This anticipatory intention is also indicated by the incorporation of the accession countries, which became members after the completion of the Convention in May 2004. However, popular views were excluded, even though an unprecedented number of ten referenda were announced before the end of the process.
