Latest No attack is much ado about nothing

Analysis: Patrick Smyth examines the latest target of the No campaigners - Article 133 of the Nice Treaty.

Analysis: Patrick Smyth examines the latest target of the No campaigners - Article 133 of the Nice Treaty.

After militarisation, neutrality, the loss of a commissioner and the national veto .... now Article 133, the last, and, some say, definitely not least of the reasons to vote No to Nice.

Or is it?

Article 133 has been dragged from what many believe is deserved obscurity to the front of the stage for one of two very different reasons.

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Either it is a crucial weapon in the armoury of liberalisers, privatisers, and globalisers and deserves to be exposed as such. Or it is a spurious means, cynically or misguidedly, to drag such emotive issues as globalisation and privatisation into a campaign about entirely other matters.

The provision, agreed after a long, hard fight at Nice, represents an attempt to extend the EU's remit from the negotiation of international trade agreements about traditional industrial or agricultural matters to the new areas of services and intellectual property.

Ahead of talks in the World Trade Organisation, the Commission will now get a mandate from the Council of Ministers which will also approve or reject any outcome.

Voting will be by qualified majority.

Supporters of the provision argued that it was anomalous to make decisions on such trade deals by unanimity when the areas they touched on were already the subject of majority voting within the framework of the internal market.

Bowing to French concerns the member-states did exempt some areas from the provision - health and education services, and cultural and audiovisual services.

What has caused some confusion among campaigners is a reference in the amended article to "the achievement of uniformity in measures of liberalisation" and which is being seen by some as an injunction to the Commission to pursue liberalisation across the board.

But, in fact, the words are drawn from the Treaty of Rome and just mean that the Commission can not negotiate an external trade deal that will impact differently on different member-states.

Far from being a liberaliser's charter, it is a defensive mechanism.

The truth is that measures to introduce competition into areas dominated in the past by state monopolies, from telecoms to electricity, have been a feature of the EU scene long before the Nice Treaty was dreamed of.

They will continue to feature whether or not the treaty is passed because they are in tune with the economic philosophy of the member-states.

The general president of SIPTU, Mr Des Geraghty, argues that the privatisation "scare" is completely misguided.

"Most privatisation has been driven by national governments failing to put adequate resources into utilities, and then hiding behind the EU," he says.

Although EU competition rules have been used as an excuse to drive privatisation of state assets, "there is no legislative provision at EU level that prevents any kind of ownership," he says, whether state or private.

"The real battle on this issue is in national states, not at EU level."

No campaigners do have a point, however, when they point to the fact that such trade deals are exempted from a requirement for approval by the European Parliament - indeed they are the only significant area of policy where the ending of national vetoes has not been accompanied by an expanded role for the European Parliament.

But such concerns are overstated, the veteran Danish Eurosceptic, Mr Jens Peter Bonde MEP argues.

He says that if trade deals are not put to parliament, MEPs will simply block other business - they have no intention of being constrained by the treaty.

Any more, it could be argued, than No campaigners are constrained by what's actually in the treaty.

Once able to show even a marginal reference in the treaty to a policy area, a broadside against a whole swathe of policies appears to be justified.

Thus, a treaty reference to a minor change in decision-making in the security field becomes the occasion for diatribes against EU "militarisation".

And an incremental change in trade negotiating procedures becomes an occasion for indicting the WTO, international capitalism, and globalisation.

Easy targets. And perhaps deserving of being targeted. But the Nice Treaty they ain't.