Back to Brussels Blog homepageI was in Stockholm this morning when the happy news arrived that Germany’s constitutional court had given the green light in principle to the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. I call the news “happy” not because I am biased in favour of Lisbon, but because it meant that for once the task of writing about the treaty fell to someone else at the Financial Times (on this occasion, my Berlin-based colleague Bertrand Benoit).
The EU’s masochistic efforts at institutional reform, encapsulated in the Lisbon treaty, were one of the first things I wrote about when I arrived in Brussels in 2007. Two years later, I find that the subject refuses to go away, seeping into my daily work like a sewage leak in a cellar (a domestic problem familiar to house-dwellers in low-lying Brussels). All the more maddening is the knowledge that almost no one in the outside world cares one stale fig about the treaty.
Still, like a junkie, I sometimes find the temptation to take one more sniff of the Lisbon glue irresistible. Today is one of those days, and I blame Charlie McCreevy, Ireland’s EU commissioner. After an EU summit on June 18-19, the Irish government announced that it would go ahead with a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty (Irish voters rejected it in a referendum in June 2008). With impeccable timing, McCreevy proceeded to offer his opinion that “95 per cent” of the EU’s member-states would have voted No if they’d been given the chance in referendums of their own.
McCreevy was, of course, the hero who boldly stated before Ireland’s first referendum that he hadn’t read the Lisbon treaty and, what’s more, he doubted that any sane person would do so. Anti-Lisbon campaigners exploited his remarks to the full. Now McCreevy seems to be saying that EU leaders are forcing the Lisbon treaty into law against the will of the overwhelming majority of the EU’s 27 countries.
On the face of it, this is a pretty astonishing statement. But will it make the slightest difference to the outcome of the second Irish referendum? I haven’t yet tested the views of my fellow-sufferers in the Lisbon junkie network, but if I did, I reckon 95 per cent would say it won’t.
Tags: European Union, Germany, Ireland, Lisbon treaty, referendums
I have been the FT's Brussels bureau chief since September 2007 and was previously the bureau chief in Frankfurt and Rome. In this blog you'll find my thoughts on everything from the European Union's foreign and economic policies to the fortunes of its political leaders - as well as the more light-hearted aspects of life in Europe.
