With Czech President Vaclav Klaus the chief remaining obstacle to final ratification of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, there has been a fair amount of loose talk about how the Czech Republic could – or should – be punished if Klaus refuses to sign it. On the one hand, supporters of the treaty say it is intolerable that the EU’s eight-year effort at redesigning its institutions should be sabotaged at the finishing post. If Klaus carries on his delaying tactics much longer, they warn, the Czechs should be denied a seat in the next European Commission.
On the other hand, opponents of the Lisbon treaty are painting the same scenario for quite different reasons. Just you watch, they say. The EU will reveal itself as an intolerant, anti-democratic machine, whipping the Czechs merely because they have the temerity to resist the imposition of a treaty they fear undermines their sovereignty.
Most, if not all, of this is not serious. Some leaders, especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, are impatient with Klaus. But EU governments as a whole are not threatening to punish the Czechs. After all, the Czech parliament has approved the treaty and the Czech government is in favour of it. Klaus is more and more isolated.
More importantly, the EU is an organisation whose first instinct is to do things by forging a consensus, not by crushing dissent. Pace Klaus, it is not the Soviet Union reinvented. The EU’s culture of consensus is both its weakness and, at times like this, its strength.
The EU learnt a sobering lesson in 2000, when Austria formed a coalition government including the far-right Freedom Party of the late Jörg Haider. The EU’s other 14 member-states punished Austria by downgrading relations and freezing contacts with Austrian ministers. It seemed a clever idea at the time. But it ended up producing the opposite effect to that intended, by making a martyr of the Austrian government and by stiffening the patriotic pride of the Austrian people (not just Austrians on the right, either).
Moreover, the EU contains an awful lot of small and medium-sized countries, especially in central and eastern Europe, which suspect that, if ever the Czech Republic were punished for stepping out of line, their turn would come, sooner or later, over some other issue.
One final point. Many intemperate calls to punish the Czechs have come from the European Parliament. And it is indeed true that, if Klaus is still holding out when the parliament conducts hearings for the new European Commission, some MEPs may give the Czech nominee a particularly hard grilling. In extremis, they could even refuse to give the entire Commission the green light because of the Klaus problem.
If they do, someone should remind them that their legislature just got elected on the smallest and most dismal turnout – 43 per cent - of any European Parliament election in history.
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