French 'No': A fatal blow to EU

As the membership was due to reach 25 the organisation began work on a constitution that would provide the foundation for a truly United Europe. It required a great deal of negotiation and debate to reach consensus among the authors representing membership at different stages of economic development. The founders, notably France and Germany, envisaged a change in the principle of equality and consensus that had hitherto characterised the decision-making in the grouping to a more pragmatic system in which the role of the members would reflect their size and strength. When a constitution was thus crafted for taking effect it had to be ratified by all 25 members in accordance with their procedures: ratification by parliament or referendum. It was at this crucial juncture France's resounding rejection of the EU's first ever constitution in a referendum last week has plunged the 25-nation bloc into a period of gloom and uncertainty.

What is problematic is that France is not just another member of the EU. It is one of the founding members of the EU and together with Germany it is regarded as principal driving force behind European movement. As the saying goes: Europe catches cold when France sneezes. The political and economic fallout from France's negative vote cannot therefore be without their profound impact on the EU. Notwithstanding a leadership crisis within the EU and growing public disenchantment with what many see as an elite-driven European project the EU leaders are struggling hard to control the damage afflicted by French and Dutch votes while hoping that they can keep the show alive. In the meantime, Luxembourg's prime minister and EU's current chairman Jean Claude Jancker has said that the treaty is not dead and ratification procedures in other EU states must not come to a halt.

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Yet, the French factor looms large over the question of European integration and with France in disarray, putting the EU back together again may not prove easy this time around. There is no denying that many French men and women who voted against the treaty were clearly doing so for domestic reasons including frustration with the politics of president Jacques Chirac. But significantly this is the first time that the population of a founding member of the EU and a country which has traditionally spearheaded European integration efforts have expressed themselves so strongly against EU policies. French action plunged the country into political upheaval and the EU into the deepest crisis in its fifty years' history. The Dutch vote three days later confirmed the trend. Has there been referendum also in other EU countries the result wouldn't have been much dissimilar.

Reaching to the flow of the events Francois Bayron, the leader of France's centrist UOF declared that the fifty republic ran out of breath. It was an observation echoed by Jean-Marc Ayrault, socialist leader in the parliament. "This is the end of a political cycle," he said, "there are parallels with the death of Fourth republic. The French are somewhat stranger to the British who have been fighting the former for the best part of 700 years. Yet they admit their ignorance of what animates their nearest European neighbour and makes it so combustible. It is an enigma to them now as it was when the French revolution," the mother of all revolutions, in 1789 burst upon Europe.

Now some of the France's leading parliamentarians are warning that the state's political institutions are bankrupt and that another political convulsion is on the way. And when France convulses, Europe changes. The French revolution changed Europe for ever. The bankruptcy of France's political system in 1930s and consequent French weakness created the opening for Hitler's armies. Then came Fifth republic in 1958 under De Gaulle that allowed successive French presidents to pursue European integration with vigour.

Without the concentration of power in the president on which De Gaulle insisted along with evisceration of its national assembly. France could not have driven European integration as hard as it did. Today every European democracy is suffering from a crisis of democratic engagement and an enfeeblement of political parties but the rot has gone the farthest in France. The presidency supposedly the embodiment of the state is structurally unaccountable. When things go well, the lack of accountability is seldom exposed. But when the system is challenged, say, for continuing unemployment, suddenly its frailty is exposed.

However, the French 'no' camp -- a strange coalition of politicians from the left and the right of the French political spectrum -- was not defending a common cause. The rights illustrated a hankering for Gaullist past. In spite of Soviet disintegration the hard left remain strong in EU. The EU vote provided a welcome, if temporary, rallying point to them. The recent return of France's massed left that includes civil servants, teachers, industrial workers and pensioners all fearful of missing the gravy train by desperately needed labour and welfare reforms -- appears to have instinctively scuttled what was painstakingly built up over last half a century -- that too by adopting an anti-immigrant, anti-EU protectionist agenda of France's far right.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.