Letter From Europe
European Union: Is this the end of a dream?
IN a nation-wide referendum held on June 12, the Irish rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, thus plunging the European Union into a constitutional crisis. It also created one more headache for the already beleaguered president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who will become the president of the EU on July1, when France starts its six-month presidency.
Now, what is the Treaty of Lisbon? It is actually nothing more or nothing less than a rehash of the old Constitutional Treaty of 2005, which was rejected by both France and Holland in nation-wide referendums.
It is a long (hundreds of pages), abstruse legal document which is so complex that even the Brussels based Eurocrats who are supposed to have written it under the aegis of Valerie Giscard d'Estang, a former French prime minister, do not quite understand it, far less explain it to the ordinary people.
Besides having a full-time European Council president and a powerful foreign policy chief for the first time, EU technocrats insist that this treaty will make the decision-making process at the highest levels of the EU bureaucracy more efficient.
They also claim that the EU will become a far more democratic organisation because the European parliament and the national parliaments will play greater roles in the decision-making process. At the same time, they hope that the new structure will empower the EU to play a greater political role on the world stage.
To come into effect, the treaty must be ratified by all the 27 member countries. Unfortunately, the approval process is not the same in all the member countries. 26 members have given this power to the legislative bodies and executive organs of their governments. Ireland is the only exception. It decided to hold a referendum on this issue.
So even though Ireland has less than 1% of the EU's total population (500 million), it has effectively stopped the Lisbon Treaty in its tracks. Eighteen members have already given the green light to the treaty.
The British House of Commons recently passed the bill. It is now in the House of Lords for ratification. Most probably, Prime Minister Brown will now come under heavy pressure to abandon the ratification process.
A lot of EU supporters think that the Irish have been ungrateful to the EU by rejecting the treaty. They point out, with some justification, that of all the EU members, the Irish have benefited the most from the EU's generous largesse (more than 40 billion euros), which has transformed Ireland from a poor, insular, largely agricultural country into one of the most prosperous countries of Europe.
Is it true that the Irish have been ungrateful? Probably not. It all depends on one's perspectives. At the heart of the debate is the question of what the Europeans, including the Irish, really want. Do they perceive the EU only as an economic union or also as a budding political entity which will one day become the United States of Europe?
There is no doubt that the primary objective of the founding fathers of the EU was political. The search for an integrated European Union owes its origin to the age-old rivalry between Germany and France, which caused two World Wars in the same century with devastating consequences.
In order to build a bridge between France and Germany and to lessen the risk of another Franco-German war, a French civil servant called Jean Monnet and the then French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, put forward the idea of a new framework for Western Europe in May 1950.
An independent supranational authority to administer a common market for coal and steel -- two items then considered as absolutely essential for all war efforts -- was set up in 1951 by France, West Germany, Italy and three Benelux countries.
The members of this semi-federal organisation, called the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), agreed to abolish all customs barriers and discriminatory practices affecting these two commodities.
Although the immediate objectives covered only economic matters, many members of the elite in both France and German nourished the idea of an eventual political integration of the member states, which would once and for all remove the possibility of another war in Europe.
But things have changed since then. The memories of the two World Wars have faded. The possibility of another war among the major European powers looks so remote, and the disenchantment with the workings of the EU among the ordinary citizens is so strong, that the idea of a closer political union like the United States of Europe is fast disappearing from the public mind.
Many of them tend to think that these are elite projects, which have nothing to do with the day to day problems and worries of the ordinary citizens like rising food prices, the oil crisis and immigration.
Then, of course, there are the important issues of national identity and sovereignty, which arouse strong feelings among many citizens. Actually, most Europeans do not want to lose their national identities, their languages and their cultures.
The Irish voters, in particular, do not want to lose their much-cherished neutrality in matters of war and peace. Most of them also fear that in the name of Europe, the Lisbon Treaty will force them to change their anti-abortion law and Catholic habits.
Many political analysts believe that if the Lisbon Treaty were put to popular vote in other member countries instead of being bamboozled through the legislatures, the voters would reject it.
So, what will happen now? Most probably, the ratification process through the legislative assemblies will continue, and if 26 of the 27 members ratify the treaty, Ireland will be asked to hold a second referendum.
According many political analysts, it is very likely that the Irish will reject it again. The Irish public opinion is very much in consonance with public opinion in countries like Britain, France and Holland, where the governments have decided not to hold referendums on this issue.
There is a general mistrust of the high-powered elitist Eurocrats of Brussels who, in the opinion of many ordinary citizens, do not have enough legitimacy because they were never elected democratically by the people.
Now the question is: Will the European Union change the ratification rules to suit its purpose, or will it eventually abandon its federalist dream of converting itself into a full-fledged United States of Europe and, instead, settle for an arrangement under which the EU will only deal with economic matters and sovereignty will unequivocally lie with the national governments?
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