Sir,
Many more questions than answers still cloud the future of the EU’s constitutional treaty. We have to go back to basics. Indeed, Europe is facing “rhetorical overstretch”, a commitment to increasingly over-ambitious targets.
Philippe de Schoutheete stays on safe ground advising that time will heal wounds and to wait for a new generation of leaders and a better political climate.
Another way out of the current impasse would be to start from the opposite end – by eliminating scenarios that would be even more detrimental than standing still. For this, we must recall the causes of our current state of stasis – the EU’s ongoing, but increasingly apparent, crisis of legitimacy possibly due to the generational shift suggested by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt in the Spring issue of this journal. Or perhaps the latest enlargement made an already incomprehensible Union even more baffling. In addition, economic stagnation in several member states doesn’t help.
The constitutional treaty was supposed to alleviate some of these concerns: it would have made the Union easier to understand, not least by streamlining its governing structure. On the negative side, it contained little to redress institutional balance. Europe would remain subject to the political will of its leaders and electoral results in one or another member state.
When looking for solutions, we should try to avoid making the problems worse, such as simply renaming the treaty (one serious mistake was ever to call it a constitution) while retaining its substance. Reducing the text to bite-size portions would not make it any more digestible, and any attempts to bring the treaty in through the back door would be seized upon by the eurosceptics, including those in the media.
Nor does it help to blame the last and future enlargements for the EU’s current crisis. The new member states were among the most enthusiastic of the treaty’s ratifiers. It is not enlargement that has created the new economic or political problems; it simply made them more visible. Thus talk about a possible “hard core” is hardly helpful, especially if this “core” were to be based on the current eurozone, itself historically based on the old member states. There is no causal link between a country’s rate of inflation and its level of willingness or ability to go along with increased integration. It would be unfortunate if just a few years after the reunification of Europe we were to find her divided again.
After weighing up the positive and negative scenarios, we aren’t left with much. The main common denominator would be to wait – either for a miracle, new and bolder leaders, faster economic growth or fresh ideas. All look unlikely at the moment, but at least we wouldn’t hit any visible rocks. In the meantime, we can continue ratification in order to build up the weight behind the current text. For better or worse, as Philippe de Schoutheete suggests, the treaty is here to stay either in its current form or as a basis for future negotiations. It is highly unlikely that a new treaty would be very different from the existing text in substance. Meanwhile, the EU will not disappear, and may even take decisions that move Europe forward.