WORLD VIEW/Paul Gillespie: A recurrent theme of debate on the future of the European Union is the gap between citizens and institutions in its political arrangements. As integration becomes deeper, it affects many more elements of political life and has more impact on ordinary people. As a result, they are demanding more accountability and clarity about EU structures and policies.
Ireland's experience as the only country to have had regular referendums on successive treaties should give us a privileged insight into this problem of relating executive decisions and citizen involvement, especially after the two Nice votes. But all the signs are that the Government parties are not willing or able to turn that to advantage in the debate on the future of Europe.
This gap was recognised in the Nice Treaty as a major problem requiring urgent attention. It inspired EU leaders at their summit meeting in Laeken, outside Brussels, in December 2001 to convene a Convention on the Future of Europe "composed of the main parties involved in the debate on the future of the Union". It is intended to pave the way for an Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) between the member-states, which will agree a new treaty unanimously.
The Convention's task was "to consider the key issues arising for the Union's future development and try to identify the various responses".
It began work in March of this year, consisting of 105 members (each with an alternate) representing the governments and parliaments of the 15 member-states, the 13 candidate states, the European Parliament and the European Commission.
Chaired by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, its business is managed by an executive committee known as the praesidium. Its work may be followed on its website (http://european-convention.eu.int).
The Convention is now completing the major first phase of its work, in which it has looked at the key issues. Many of them are identified in the titles of the 10 working groups, established in the first phase, on: subsidiarity; the Charter of Fundamental Rights; the EU's legal personality; the role of national parliaments; complementary competences; economic governance; external action; defence; simplification of legislative procedures and instruments; and the area of freedom, security and justice.
The first six of these have reported, many of them dealing with technical-legal matters. The last four are more political, although there is a strong left-right division running through the working group on economic governance. And they will be supplemented by other groups, for example on the European social model, which arose from the initial discussions, and, crucially, on EU institutions, which the praesidium is to address in a document after Christmas.
The work of identifying the various responses to these issues will be helped enormously by the preliminary draft constitution for the EU presented by Giscard d'Estaing at the end of October. It sets out a rational framework for discussing and negotiating a new treaty that would be more comprehensible to citizens.
THE Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, and the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, have dismissed the Convention as a talking shop which cannot dictate the real business of negotiations between governments.
"The Convention proposes but the IGC disposes. Anyone who thinks the IGC will be a rubber stamp for the Convention is mistaken," Mr McDowell said in Brussels on Thursday.
Formally and legally they are correct. But they overlook the reality that politics has been invited to begin in the Convention and is taking very firm root there. Their attitude and the Government's minimalist political involvement in the process so far overlook that reality at their peril.
It means, as Denis Staunton pointed out in a stimulating article in these pages on Thursday, that "they could be out-manoeuvred in the final negotiations" with the result that the Government would be left "with the sorry task of selling to the Irish people a treaty it does not itself believe in". It seems astonishing that they should take such an approach after the Nice experience.
The Government's response to the first referendum defeat was to take a series of initiatives at national level which mirror what the EU as a whole has done with the Convention.
The National Forum on Europe was set up to intensify public debate on the EU; a stronger Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs has been given the task of scrutinising EU legislation and negotiations in advance. And the second Nice referendum this autumn saw a successful effort by the Government, Opposition parties and civil society organisations to mobilise a Yes vote and conduct a frank debate with citizens on EU issues.
There was a clear consensus as the results were announced that this level of public engagement should be continued into this next and more important stage of the European debate.
Indeed Ireland became in the process arguably the best informed member-state, its public opinion much better prepared for the issues to come. It had an opportunity to help make the Convention debate in public into a real public debate.
INSTEAD of capitalising on this, the Government seems to be reverting to pre-Nice attitudes. The Convention is dismissed. The Oireachtas committee (and the Convention delegation) complain bitterly about being under-resourced. And Ministers assert the primacy of the IGC where they have the veto in secret negotiations and final horse-trading.
The Nice referendums obscured political divisions between the major parties, which the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat coalition now emphasise by attacking John Bruton and Proinsias De Rossa as federalists opposed to Irish interests. The coalition's neo-liberal wing is once again assertive, as it was in 2000 before Nice I. In the process, they may dissipate public support and reintroduce a false polarity between statist and federalist models of integration.
They revert to a highly defensive and reactive approach to negotiations, in which they have few allies. This makes them more vulnerable on taxation, defence and criminal law issues than they need to be. Ireland has excluded itself from a grouping of smaller states committed to strengthening the existing EU institutions as the best way to resist domination by the larger ones. Effectively, we are positioned with the more sceptical and inter-governmentalist Danes, Swedes and British.
Ironically, we are thereby likely to get the worst of both worlds.
This should be a wake-up call to the Opposition parties and citizen groups to bring the European debate more vigorously into the political arena.
Ireland needs to identify some big ideas about the future of Europe and find allies to push them through. That confidence and interest was there in the second Nice debate and could be harnessed once again.