The man who sold Europe the treaty that never was

18th January 2008
By Jan Rood

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With the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon (the Reform Treaty) a long and ponderous period of negotiations, even for European standards, seems to have come to an end. That period started almost eight years ago — on 12 May 2000 — when the then German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, called for the determination of the finalité politique of the European integration process in an address given at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

In Fischer’s vision that finality could only mean a federal Europe. His call initiated a sequence of events which were all based on a huge misunderstanding, specifically the suggestion that the EU member states had committed themselves to bring about a European Union constitution in the traditional sense and so lay the basis for a federal Europe.

That misunderstanding was fuelled by the Treaty of Nice, in which member states agreed on the next rendezvous regarding treaty reform where items such as the division of competences between the Union and the member states and the fundamental rights of the European citizens should be addressed.

The member states added a little extra with the Laken Declaration of December 2001, in which they set the agenda for a new treaty. In Laken not only was the notion of a constitution introduced, but the member states let their direction slide by instituting a European Convention.

Coming up with ‘a draft treaty to establish a constitution for Europe’ this widely composed European Convention, under the chairmanship of former French president Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, made no secret of its constitutional ambitions. Giscard himself embroidered this by comparing his European Convention with the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia in 1787 from which sprang the American Constitution.

Blinded by his own ambitions, Giscard created a false image for the new treaty which soon backfired during the French and the Dutch referendums.

Whichever way one looks at it, the treaty was never actually meant to lay the foundations for a federally-designed European Union; leaving aside the symbolism with regard to the European flag and anthem, one could not find any evidence of the emergence of a European superstate in the Constitutional Treaty’s text.

But by naming and presenting the document as the Constitutional Treaty the Eurosceptics were offered a convenient argument to mobilise opposition against the treaty. With hindsight one can speak of a charade of misnaming and misrepresentation.

This misrepresentation has continued by suggesting — particularly in those countries which opposed the Constitutional Treaty — that the new Reform Treaty is fundamentally different from the European Constitution. Specifically it has been argued that the Reform Treaty blocks any development towards a European superstate, therewith in hindsight and paradoxically suggesting that such a development was implied in the Constitutional Treaty.

The result of this course of events is total confusion as to what the new Reform Treaty is all about and what it really means. Some governments argue that the Reform Treaty is so much different from the Constitutional Treaty that a referendum is no longer required; other states also conclude that there is no need to put the Reform Treaty to their population, but for a different and opposite reason — that the new treaty is basically a copy of the Constitutional Treaty, which had already been ratified at an earlier stage by referendum.

Apart from political opportunism and overambition, the basic cause of this total confusion is a misrepresentation of what treaty revision in the EU is really about and what it really means. All the rhetoric notwithstanding, the process of treaty modification that the EU has been involved in during the past 20 years — ever since the lead up to the Single European Act of 1986 — has always been a very slow and pragmatic process of small, incremental steps: a bit more qualified majority voting, a little increase of power for the European parliament, and so forth.

That was and remains the only way to achieve progress and to guarantee the EU’s decisiveness, democratic legitimacy and transparency. Far-reaching reforms, great leaps forward, are simply impossible given the lack of agreement between member states.

The European constitution — the constitutional rhetoric notwithstanding — was no exception to this rule. That also holds for the new Treaty of Lisbon. They both were and are no more and no less than revising treaties — small adjustments in order to make the EU more effective and more democratic.

All the same it should be realised that some of these small steps as envisaged in the new treaty may have important consequences. This particularly applies where the Treaty of Lisbon introduces new figures such as the permanent president of the European Council and the European Union’s High Representative for CFSP.

It is as yet unclear what precise impact their emergence will have on intra-Union relations and on the integration process, but impact it certainly will.

Nevertheless, in themselves these two new posts do not make true what is not true — that the Reform Treaty creates a super-state.

Jan Q. Th. Rood is director of the European Studies Programme (CESP) of the Clingendael Institute in The Hague.

Filed Under: EU, Europe, Reform Treaty, European Constitution, Treaty of Lisbon
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