Campaigners against the Lisbon Treaty across Europe are seeking to capitalise on the Irish No vote, write Derek Scallyand Isabel Conway.
AS THE DUST settles after Ireland's referendum result, opponents of the Lisbon Treaty are emerging once more across the Continent.
It comes as little surprise that the most energy is emanating from The Netherlands and France, where organised campaigners brought ratification of the constitutional treaty to a screeching halt in 2005.
One of the best organised movements is Attac, a group critical of globalisation, which has local branches in 14 European countries. It is calling for a "social, ecological and democratic Europe" and opposes what it sees as an EU neo-liberal bias.
"I think people who voted No are coming together, united around a new platform that the EU has to become more democratic," said political scientist Susan George, former vice-president of Attac in France.
"We can't say where this is going. What we hope is that European leaders will start listening to us, that we consider undemocratic the Europe they are proposing. We are afraid that EU leaders are going to cause huge problems for themselves by plunging on ahead after the Irish vote." Many Attac branches are calling for an EU-wide debate and the election of a constituent assembly - including citizens - to write a new constitution to be put to the vote across the EU on the same day.
Besides Attac, French opponents of the constitutional treaty range across the spectrum, from communists and dissident socialists to right-wing populist parties. One of France's most prominent No campaigners in 2005, former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius, said the lesson of the Irish vote was that it is impossible to build the EU without popular consent.
"Such agreement is only achievable if the concrete focus of Europe is more democratic and more social, more environmental and simpler," he said in an interview in Le Parisien.
"Quite apart from the method of European construction, its direction has been brought into question: citizens are in favour of Europe, but a Europe that is committed to solidarity and which is their project."
French senator Jean-Luc Mélenchon, one of the key Socialist figures in the 2005 campaign, urged EU leaders to "examine their consciences" and learn the lesson of producing "unintelligible texts to conceal the liberal essence" of the EU's politics.
In The Netherlands, Lisbon Treaty opponents hope that a revamped campaign, "Voor een andere Europa" (For another Europe), can stop the "rubber-stamped" ratification in the Dutch senate next month. It collected 42,000 signatures before the Dutch parliament passed the treaty with the support of the main political parties.
Yesterday, its founder and spokesman Willem Bos said: "we are calling our new campaign Irish Spring, because it has breathed new life into our fight to let the people discuss the kind of Europe they want, and not have it done on their behalf by elitist bureaucrats in Brussels."
Dutch campaigners hope that the looming senate vote will, after the Irish decision, be more than the expected formality. "When Dutch voters three years ago said No to a constitution for Europe, our prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende declared the constitution dead; if we ignore the democratic process in Ireland we are saying that their vote doesn't matter, that it is less important than what French and Dutch voters decided," said Mr Bos.
Dutch European affairs spokesman for the Socialists, Harry van Bommel, said "everything has changed with this rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland; it was a thinly-disguised alternative, 95 per cent similar to what Dutch and French voters shot down." A weekend poll showed the Dutch would have rejected the Lisbon Treaty by a comfortable majority had a referendum been held here.
Across the border in Germany, the year-old Left Party was the only mainstream party to oppose the Lisbon Treaty. EU spokesman Deither Dehm said the Irish No has seen the "complete collapse of the EU turbo-capitalism strategy". The challenge now, he says, is to transfer Lisbon opponents from a "No track" to a "Yes track". "We have to say we want a constitution of peaceful, democratic, social integration," he said.
"Any new constitution must have nuances against rigorous market dominance, to be able to act as a counter force." He cites as an example the tone of Germany's post-war constitution, stating that "human dignity is inviolable" or, in article 15, that land, natural resources and means of production can be transferred into public ownership "for the purpose of socialisation".
Bavarian MP Peter Gauweiler, who has launched a constitutional challenge to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, said: "Our long-term goal should be for all of us to have the same rights in the EU as the Irish, in particular for referenda." The Irish vote has been a shot in the arm for opponents of the Lisbon Treaty in many EU member states.
But some political observers from new member states suggest it is going too far to suggest that unhappiness about any perceived democratic deficit is an EU-wide phenomenon. "Any country that joined in 2004 hasn't profoundly felt or understood that there is such a thing as a democratic deficit," said Piotr Kaczynski, a Polish research fellow at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies.
"Surveys show that people in new member states trust European solutions more than national governments. The new member states have given the EU institutions new legitimacy to act on their behalf."
Just as EU leaders admit it is too early to predict with certainty the future of the Lisbon Treaty, leading opponents say it's too soon to say whether they will succeed in creating a coherent EU-wide movement to change the treaty or the Union that created it.