Can the Treaty work with 26?

This is currently being mooted around the capitals of Europe.

Reuters UK Germany says EU may still pursue EU Treaty

It's a fascinating legal and political question. I'd have thought not, but I think at a minimum there would need to be agreement from the Commission, unanimous agreement from the Council (including Ireland) and the parliament not to mention the ECJ' at least tacit agreement (maybe someone should ask them).

In practice I think it's a lot harder, you could end up with "Lisbon" members and "non-Lisbon" members of the EU. It's quite difficult to determine how you can be in the EU and not be affected by Lisbon if it enters into legal force. Proposals to end the rotating Presidency can't be adopted in part. Of course, if there's only one "non-Lisbon" member....

For this exercise to have any legs at all the Associate membership option ("non-Lisbon" membership) might be worked up into something attractive and non-punitive (keepng your MEP's and Commissioner etc). It would become an EU membership status for a member state that had not ratified a Treaty provision and under it the country concerned would retain their legal position as to internal law (and therefore any cases before the ECJ) as per the last treaty that had been ratified and in force.

And of course the Irish government would have to be willing participants.

Is this realistic? Is it pure fantasy? Denial?

All eyes now on Sarkozy and Merkel for the next chapter in what promises to be a long running saga.

The guilty parties

Who's to blame for the Lisbon Treaty fiasco?

I have two candidates.

I think Google and the Internet means that all information is at the fingertips of everyone and therefore allowing the great and good to go off and do their own thing in a well meaning way is increasingly not an option. Makes the politics of such treaties harder and harder to sustain against insurgent populist campaigns. Voters are less and less willing to trust their elected leaders on such matters and less tolerant of treaties they can't read.

But surely the single person most clearly blameworthy person has to be France's very own Valery Giscard D'Estaing.

After British politicians warned against calling it a Constitution - he went ahead and called it a Constitutional Treaty..... thereby guaranteeing the opposition of the die hard anti-Europeans, and incidentally pushing the French and Dutch to hold their own referendums, killing the first version of the Treaty stone dead and carrying the Reform Treaty in its wake.

Finally he gave this quote about the Lisbon Treaty, which wasn't the greatest help in the ratification campaign:

public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals we dare not present to them directly

When the Lisbon Treaty has friends like these, I don't think there's really much of a role for eurosceptic No campaigns.

Putting it all back together again

The biggest complaint that I hard against the Treaty of Lisbon is that it was too long and full of legal sounding phrases.

If you want a minimalistic treaty that does not grant excessive powers to the EU, seems to me that you will end up with a carefully written, long, legalistic, international treaty.

Whether this is appropriate material for a referendum is open to debate - I don't think it is and I am a firm believer in Parliamentary democracy.

I do not, in fact, believe that referendums are a more valid expresion of the popular will than representative democracy and I think the Irish result demonstrates that in abundance.

The Irish referendum demonstrates that people are wont to vote on all sorts of things, both real and unreal - the current government, fears over abortion, neutrality and so on, not focusing on the text of the Treaty which will (even if realy pared down) be too long and complicated for the electorate (how many people in the UK read the parties' respective manifestos?).

Any way, the fact of the matter is that Ireland does have this constitutional requirement of a referendum which is queering everyone's pitch so far as I can tell.

There might be some point adding protocols and binding declarations to the Treaty and then getting Ireland to vote again but that is not likely to work, as most people now admit.

Many of the No campaign in France and also Ireland state they are in favour of a "social Europe" and yet that is the first thing that has been killed off - it is now all but impossible to get things like the Charter of Fundamental Rights through the ratification process, and as for the rest. Certainly new accessions now seem very remote.

Future treaties are likely to be very simple, one issue only where the heavens will not fall in if the vote is not carried and where the matter at hand is so technical and minor only Ireland will have a referendum. And written on one side of A4, so it can be read by voters before casting their ballot.

There might even be a way of making changes to practice without a new Treaty, perhaps proceeding intergovernmentaly, perhaps by setting up new Treaty bodies that countries can opt into (and out of?) at their leisure.

I am sure, with Denis McShane in today's Times, that the EU will continue, but the EU that our political elites have imagined over the past decade is now well and truly at an end.


Comment in today's Guardian:

Fintan O'Toole The fear factory that devastated Ireland's political class
Colm Toibin A godsend to every crank in Ireland

Ireland scuppers Lisbon (according to early reports)

Making three countries that voted No in referendums on the Constitution/Lisbon process.

Maybe we should look at plans B, C, D, E and F.

Time report

Guardian report

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Will Ireland scupper Lisbon?

Many of Europe's capitals are now on tenter hooks as they await the result of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

In the event of a No options will be to tweak the Treaty and vote again or just abandon the whole thing.

If abandoned, options will include annual mini treaties (not the same as mini treats) with each individual item of the Lisbon Treaty or a core of European countries going it alone with Britain and Ireland on the outside.

3rd reading of the Lisbon Treaty

Just catching up on some blogging to mention the excellent debate in the House of Commons to give the Lisbon Treaty Bill a 3rd Reading (11th March)

Previously the House debated a proposal to submit the Bill to a referendum and defeated it - rightly in my view.

There is nothing that has been brought to my attention that would come anywhere near warranting a referendum, which in general is a bad way to make major political decisions, given we are a Parliamentary democracy with the idea that a parliamentary majority is the way all our major decisions are made.

There is of course a role for referendums, notably where the governing party is divided and cannot sustain its majority or because of a fundamental change such as adopting the euro or where a proposed change is (paradoxically) of less importance and you want to give people a choice at a local level (such as elected mayors, regional assemblies).

The only case for a referendum on the now defunct Constitution (which in itself was not that ambitious and represented incremental change) was that it had the symbolism of a Constitution and it was that kind of symbolics which suggested a referendum was of value.

At the time I must say I was not convinced. Europe isn't for most people a misty eyed thing that you embrace and fall in love with. For me it's a pragmatic mechanism that as a matter of simple fact the UK decided to join the EU because it felt it was in its overall interests and for that reason stays and works to improve it.

Going out there and persuading people to love the EU is daft - for good or ill (usually for ill, but there we have it) we Brits are congenitally sceptical of anything and love nothing better than poking fun at them there foreigners with their strange ways that are so clearly inferior to ours.

(This was the reason that we joined the EU late - 1972 as opposed to 1958 when it was first set up. We just couldn't believe that something run by our continental 'cousins' would work. We wanted to be "in Europe, but not run by Europe" a vast "area of free trading sovereign nations" .... so we set up EFTA as an alternative but seeing that the EU worked quite well we decided - that is to say the elected majority in Parliament decided - to join the EU - of course the Labour government did hold a referendum because it was so hopelessly divided it had to do so to maintain its majority and stay in office, but not for any other reason).

All those wonky banana stories are just too good to not print if you are a tabloid editor - though the determination of our culture to prick pomposity and lampoon any bureaucracy is not a totally bad trait either.

And all of these traits have helped to form the Lisbon Traety which makes the EU work at 27 as opposed to 15 (with surely the thought that there are quite a few countries yet to come in, albeit smaller e.g. the Balkan states) but addressing all of the negotiating points identified by eurosceptics over the years. Subsidiarity is in the Treaty and is defined along with a principal of conferral (the EU only has power explicitly conbferred on it, for example. Britain has oodles of 'opt ins', that is areas where the UK can opt in if it wants to but doesn't have to and there is explicit recognition of the role of the National Parliaments, giving them a veto over extensions of qualified majority voting.

Of course there's a lot of content that's the same as the defunct Constitution, but that's because there is widespread agreement on some relatively minor changes, like ending the rather silly rotating presidency (rotating every 6 months), extending QMV in some areas (mostly technical) and improving the votes' weighting system - increasing the UK's share of the vote.

In summary:

- Yes to the EU and our continued membership
- Yes to the Treaty of Lisbon as a good amending Treaty
- No to a referendum because we are a Parliamentary democracy
- Yes (hopefully) to an end to euro-institutional navel gazing
- No to any more EU treaties (amending or otherwise) for the next 20 years........

The link to the Hansard debate at 3rd reading is here

The link to the Parliament web for the Bill is here

For information on who voted which way see here

The Government majority was 140, which is very solid.

Rees Mogg is at it again

Article in today's Times by Rees-Mogg - one of many to come I should think - basically a thinking person's way of saying Gordon Brown is dishonouring the war dead of many centuries with cartoons of spitfires and war graves (you need the Sun for that).

Just a brief reminder of where Rees-Mogg (he is actually a person and not a cat) is that he is opposed to anything connected to the EU, and actually took the then Conservative Government to Court as far back as 1993 arguing that the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty was unconstitutional. He lost......

He won't have any difficulty accomodating himself to today's Europhobic Tories however.

I support the Reform Treaty

Not only do I support it, I hope it is ratified through the Parliamentary mechanism after extensive debate and line by line scrutiny, which is in accordance with the UK parliamentary tradition that the Tories are trying to overthrow.

I must say that in this regard I disagree with the handfull of euro-sceptic Labour MP's wanting a referendum. There should only be a referendum when we are choosing to go into something like the euro, or creating radically new arrangements or institutions (e.g. devolved Parliaments) or where the governing party is hopelessly divided like Wilson's Labour government in the early 1970's.

Although there's a lot of bluster from the Tories I think they are making a big mistake putting so much effort into being anti-European and think they'll suffer from it in the longer run.

And an excellent article on why we should support the Reform Treaty from some time back in the Guardian.