Dooge Committee
The ad hoc committee for institutional questions , usually referred to as the Dooge committee after the committee chairman James Dooge , was a commission set up by the European Council in 1984 to develop proposals for an institutional reform of the European Community . It produced a report which was adopted by the heads of state and government of the EC at the 1985 Milan European Council. This report laid the foundations for the Single European Act adopted at the end of 1985 .
prehistory
At the beginning of the 1980s, the process of European integration found itself in a serious crisis, caused on the one hand by the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 and the resulting economic crisis, on the other hand by violent internal conflicts over the financing of the common agricultural policy and Margaret Thatcher's insistence on a reduction due to UK contributions to the EC. This crisis phase, known as Eurosclerosis , was broken at the Fontainebleau European Council in June 1984, at which the European heads of state and government agreed to the British rebate demanded by Thatcher . Nevertheless, the European Council saw further measures to be necessary to revive the integration process. On the one hand, the European Community should be closer to the citizens , and on the other, institutional reforms should be carried out in order to simplify decision-making in the future.
Two ad hoc commissions were set up for this purpose: on the one hand, the Adonnino committee , which was supposed to draw up proposals for greater proximity to the citizens, and on the other hand the Dooge committee. This comprised eleven members - one representative from each of the then ten member countries and the European Commission - and was headed by the Irish conservative James Dooge . His work was based, among other things, on the Genscher-Colombo Initiative of 1981 and on the European Parliament's draft constitution, which it had drawn up by the beginning of 1984 under the leadership of Altiero Spinelli .
Suggested Actions
The Dooge report formulated several “priority objectives” which the EC should prefer to address, including the completion of the European single market , cooperation in technology, the development of the European monetary system and the expansion of the European Communities' own resources . In addition, he suggested giving the EC new competencies, including in environmental policy , social policy , legal policy and cultural policy . Furthermore, European political cooperation in foreign and defense policy should be expanded.
In order to implement this, the report proposed that decisions in the Council of the European Communities should generally be voted on by majority vote and only in a few exceptional cases by unanimity. In addition, the European Commission should be downsized and the role of the Commission President strengthened. Finally, the European Parliament , which until then had hardly any powers, should now also be involved in the legislative process.
All these changes should be institutionalized through a reform of the EEC Treaty . For this, the Dooge report proposed the establishment of an intergovernmental conference before.
consequences
The final report of the Dooge Commission was presented at the European Council in Milan on 28/29. June 1985 presented and adopted by the European heads of state and government. It formed the basis for the work of the Intergovernmental Conference, which was set up at the same Council summit to work out a reform of the EEC Treaty . This reform, which was adopted in December 1985 as the Single European Act , took up most of the suggestions made in the Dooge report. However, the proposed changes in the way the European Commission works and the strengthening of the European Parliament were not initially implemented in this way. Only through later treaty reforms, in particular the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, was the Parliament involved in EC legislation through the co-decision procedure .