Author is President of demosEUROPA—Centre for European Strategy, Warsaw.
Whatever we think about the Irish referendum, one thing is clear. The project of bringing the EU closer to the citizens is bankrupt. It may have been the big idea of politicians with misty eyes earlier this decade but not much remains of that ambition today. The lessons of the French and Dutch votes, which rejected the European constitution three years ago, have not been learned. Wrong conclusions were drawn that the citizens did not accept a high level of ambition for Europe. As a result, a lot of team went into pricking the bubble of Europe’s constitutional aspirations, not enough into having the public on board. As a result, there is no certainty who the owner of the process is but it is certainly not the European citizens. Bertold Brecht may have commented in 1953 in a different historical context that the government should dissolve the people and elect another. The European political class seems to have missed the irony.
What has not been realized is that the European Union cannot remain an elites-driven process where the citizens are occasional and not very welcome visitors. Leaving it to the governments to pull the strings may have been possible at the time of the founding fathers who indeed rushed things through without much of a democratic debate. Robert Schumann made sure that the French cabinet of ministers, not to say the public, did not have much say on what he proposed in 1950 because if they did, there would not have been the Schumann Plan and all that followed. The situation has changed remarkably since. The European Union is now a club of self-confident democracies with fervent public debates. Having been invited to vote on the successive European treaties, the societies will not want to return to the good old days when they simply blessed the governments to do whatever they felt like in Europe. The genie is out of the bottle.
Regardless of the solution this time around—whether the Treaty of Lisbon can be patched up or not—it is clear that the European Union needs to change the way it reforms itself. This reflection needs to take place now to strike the iron while it is hot. Agreeing on how to go about treaty change in the future should be part of the package that may offer a solution to the Irish crisis.
There is no doubt that holistic treaty reforms, in the course of which all issues are open and reexamined, are over. They are no longer feasible in the EU of twenty seven members with the requirement of ratification by all. They are an invitation to all sorts of populisms which exploit the complexity of the European process. The answer is not only to try to write treaties in a more understandable fashion, although that would clearly help. We should accept that the European Union is not a state and a such it cannot have a straight forward legal framework. It is a community of law which needs contracts to be concluded between the member states. These are bound to be complex and unreadable for most of us.
But the real answer lies elsewhere. Future treaty reforms should be about single issues such as energy & climate change or foreign policy. This is how it all started when the European Coal and Steel Community had a clear emphasis on an area of vital importance to Europe’s future. The biggest innovation of the Treaty of Lisbon is the streamlining of the EU’s foreign policy. The Treaty creates the double-hatted High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy who would preside over meetings of foreign ministers and function as Vice-President of the European Commission. An embryonic common European diplomatic service is also established. This could easily become substance of a separate agreement. Similarly on energy, the creation of a common European policy in the area may not come about without a separate contractual arrangement between member states, covering interconnections between the national systems and strategic reserves with an independent agency in charge. Single issue treaties would enable a massive step forward in communication with the citizens. Given that the single most important reason for the rejection of the Treaty of Lisbon in Ireland was confusion about its content, it could only be remedied by tackling one question at a time.
Such an approach would make life difficult for the governments since they can now pick and choose what aspects of an EU treaty they want to communicate to the citizens. As a result, public debates in the member states often run in opposite directions. Single issue treaties would mean that the citizens are taken seriously and considered genuine partners in the discussion. More truth rather than less would help the European project. Importantly, the integration project would advance on substance rathe than merely on the institutions as in the last decade.
A commentator once said after the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 was passed that “fudge is the necessary condition of progress in Europe”. That sentence no longer holds. Fudge is not the condition of progress. It is a conditions of regression. The sooner we realize it the better.
