It’s striking that the Czech constitutional court announced its approval of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty on Tuesday morning just as the prospect of another Russian gas import crisis began to loom on the EU’s horizon. For even though the news from Prague is welcome, a moment’s reflection is all you need to remind yourself that the Lisbon treaty will, in and of itself, do very little to help the EU address its most serious foreign and economic policy problems.
The sheer sense of relief at adopting a new EU treaty – it’s taken eight years, required two different texts, gone through three failed referendums and caused endless trouble in countries such as the Czech Republic, Ireland and the UK – risks fostering the delusion that everything will be better once Lisbon is in force. But this is to fall into the trap of assuming that process can substitute for substance (see Monday’s blog on how the same fallacy affects the EU’s approach to relations with other big powers).
Last January witnessed the eruption of a Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute that deprived a number of eastern European countries of gas supplies for two weeks in the middle of winter. It was, in many ways, a re-run of a similar episode in January 2006. Like that crisis, it exposed the EU’s abysmal lack of progress in fashioning a common external energy policy. The Lisbon treaty will not improve the situation - or, for that matter, make things worse. What counts is political will, which treaties do not produce out of thin air.
A similar consideration applies to the co-ordination of EU economic and fiscal policy. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, with the huge increase in budget deficits and public debts since the start of the financial crisis, the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact – its fiscal rulebook – has become close to irrelevant. Yet the EU, and the 16-nation eurozone in particular, badly needs a credible system of fiscal controls. The Lisbon treaty will not provide it. It can only come from governments acting with a strong sense of responsibility towards each other because they share the same currency.
The truth is, I think, that supporters of the Lisbon treaty have overstated its benefits since it was signed in December 2007, and critics have overstated its defects. The EU has not ground to a halt because of the lack of a new treaty since it acquired 12 new member-states in 2004 and 2007. Nor will it be transformed into the world’s most dynamic power once the treaty takes effect. The best thing you can say about the treaty is that, now it is certain to come into force, there will be no need to say much about it ever again.
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on