Le Monde diplomatique
Tuesday 26 February 2008
On January 1, 2009, several of the European Union's twenty-seven member states risk being equipped with institutions their people had rejected. By then, the Treaty of Lisbon, signed last December by the heads of state or government, should be ratified by all the Union's member states. Hungary, Slovenia, Rumania and France have already done so.
Yet Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy had stated: "Being a consistent and rational European and a responsible politician means not behaving after the French 'no' to the European Constitution as though nothing had happened! The French have sent us a message: I intend to take it into account." That was June 2006....
His election to the presidency apparently having operated as a blank check to annul the expression of the people's will with respect to European matters, he has just succeeded in getting over three-quarters of French members of Parliament to adopt a text virtually identical to the one 54.68 percent of the voters rejected on May 29, 2005. The Socialist Party could have imposed another referendum. It had committed itself to do so, then abandoned the idea.
Several weeks before the 2004 European elections, Mr. Anthony Blair, anxious to cut the ground out from under the United Kingdom's numerous Euro-skeptics, promised to submit the Union's basic law to universal suffrage. His chosen successor, Mr. Gordon Brown, preferred to entrust the British Parliament with the charge of ratifying the Treaty of Lisbon(1).
In June 2005, Dutch citizens rejected the European Constitutional Treaty by 62 percent of the vote. In order not to take the risk of consulting them again, since they never respond the way they ought to, there also it will soon accrue to Parliament to ratify the text approved last December by the European Council. Finally, in Portugal, the Socialist Party had proclaimed during the February 2005 legislative elections that it would submit the Constitutional proposal of the day to a popular vote. Prime Minister José Sócrates has backpedaled, offering as a pretext - like Mr. Sarkozy, like Mr. Brown, like the Dutch Socialists - the explanation that "the circumstances have completely changed. It's a different treaty." Isn't it "simplified?"(2)
Such flippancy gives one food for thought when, in France, Mr. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing effortlessly concedes that "in the Treaty of Lisbon, redacted exclusively from the proposed Constitutional Treaty [dead in 2005], the tools are exactly the same. Only their order in the toolbox has been changed."(3) "There is no substantive difference," also observed the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Commission, although dominated by the Labor Party. In short, only the Irish will have the right, some time in May or June, to a referendum.
In 1983, François Mitterrand stated that he was "divided between two ambitions - one to construct Europe, and one for social justice."(4) Would democracy stand in the way in of the first of these ambitions? Is it a matter of indifference that the members of Parliament who have contradicted the decision made by universal suffrage belong more and more to the privileged social classes, while the "no" in France and the Netherlands won hands down in the grassroots electorate?
With a degree in public law, former minister Jack Lang has perhaps answered all these questions. He deemed that it was pointless to "brawl over legal dispositions that not even specialists understand. And then, you know, a treaty is only a treaty."
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(1) This ratification occurred in the Commons on January 21, 2008, carried by 362 votes to 224. The House of Lords has yet to adjudicate.
(2) In his speech of February 10, broadcast on television and radio, Mr. Sarkozy used that adjective five times. Yet the text numbers 287 pages, with 356 modifications to previous treaties, over 13 protocols, 65 statements, and an appendix. See Bernard Cassen, "Résurrection de la 'Constitution' européenne," Le Monde diplomatique, December 2007.
(3) Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, "La boîte à outils du traité de Lisbonne," Le Monde, 27 October 2007.
(4) Quoted by Jacques Attali, Verbatim 1, Fayard, Paris, 1993, p. 399.
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