Ratification of the Treaty

Written by Andrew Duff and published in ft.com on Sun 2nd Jan 2005

Two down, twenty three to go. The new Constitution of the European Union has now been ratified by both the Lithuanian and Hungarian parliaments, without much fuss or, as far as one can tell, rancour. The whole process is supposed to be finished in time for the Constitution to come into force on 1 November 2006.

It will not be so simple elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, as things stand, it will be impossible. The British public mood is set against the Constitution, and there is no campaign to change it.

The government is running scared of talking about Europe at all. When it brings itself to mention the Constitution as it did in a recent Foreign Office pamphlet and in a speech by Jack Straw to the Centre for European Reform it cannot bring itself to use the two arguments that can be guaranteed to swing a British audience in its favour. These are, first, that the Constitution will enable the Union to stand up to the Americans, and, second, that the European Parliament is the big winner. The British media - with the obvious exceptions - remain opinionated and uninformed on Europe. The BBC, which has no full time correspondent covering the work of the EU institutions, is even conducting an enquiry into whether its coverage is too 'pro-European'.

So Britain's partners should start getting used to the idea that there will be no Constitution - or at least no Constitution including Britain. They have a long way to go. The European Council has shown no sense of collective responsibility, let alone a capacity for leadership, on the Constitution. There will be no coordinated campaign for the Constitution. Indeed, there seems to be a race to the back of the ratification queue by those leaders running frightened of public opinion. Mr Barroso's Commission is not much better. It is merely planning a first-class information campaign in the fond belief that the public will suddenly get interested in what the Constitution really says.

Europe's citizens are not going to be disturbed by the smack of firm government from Brussels. Worse, neither the Council nor the Commission has a contingency for when it all goes wrong. They even think it virtuous to have no 'plan B'. Nobody seems prepared to answer the perfectly sensible and very common question: 'what happens if I say no?'.

Let's begin some scenario building. If a lot of countries say no, especially larger ones by big majorities, everyone's in trouble. The Union will have to stagger on under the Treaty of Nice. We will probably have to accept Bulgaria and Romania as members, but further enlargement will be out of the question. There will certainly be moves from the original six members plus Spain, Portugal and Finland to create a core group of integrationist minded states who will seek to move forward alone to meet at least some of the aspirations of the European Convention which drafted the lost Constitution. Some of this ambition could be achieved using the 'enhanced cooperation' clauses of Nice, but progress in foreign policy, security and defence will need a new treaty along the lines of the aborted European Defence Community of 1954.

If only the UK says no, it's the UK that's in trouble. Although it will have the legal veto to block constitutional progress for the rest of Europe it will have neither the moral authority nor the political credibility to do so. Chancellor Schussel of Austria will have to chair a crisis meeting of the European Council in June 2006. He is no Metternich. His options are limited.

Prime minister Gordon Brown will surely refuse to have another UK referendum to get the answer right. His new colleagues will refuse, quite rightly, to renegotiate the constitutional package in an attempt to persuade British nationalists to switch their vote when most EU leaders already resent the concessions they made to the UK in the Convention and at the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC). The consensus of the twenty five member states is the Constitution, no more, no less.

Doing nothing at all is always a possibility, but paralysis and inertia in Europe would hardly be sellable to domestic public opinion, and certainly impossible to justify on the global stage.

What is likely to happen is the convening of a short, sharp IGC whose only function is to amend Article 48 of the Treaty on European Union to allow the Constitution to come into force before all member states have ratified it. This should cause no problem for the member states who have already said yes. It would surely lead to another referendum in the UK where the political choice on offer could not be more stark. It will be in or out of Europe. The new Constitution, once in force, offers a negotiable route to voluntary withdrawal from full membership and a refuge in a neighbourly privileged partnership. The latter was crafted for the Ukraine, but would do well enough for the UK too.

Andrew Duff MEP, a Liberal Democrat, is writing a book on the Constitution.