FRANCE:Ireland's No vote has cast a big shadow over France's upcoming presidency of the EU, writes Lara Marlowein Paris.
FRENCH OFFICIALS sent contradictory signals over the weekend concerning Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, at a press conference in Paris with US president George Bush, vowed not to let the Irish "incident" stop the ratification process. But moments after he seemed to disregard the Irish No, he acknowledged it was a wake-up call.
"Many Europeans do not understand the way in which we are now building Europe," he said. "We have to take this into account, very quickly, and change our way of building Europe."
Speaking at a conference in Korea, the French finance minister Christine Lagarde expressed solidarity with the Irish: "We Europeans believe that it is either all of us, or none of us," she said.
There is no doubt, as a high-ranking European diplomat in Paris put it, that the No vote "cast a very big shadow over the French EU presidency" which will start on July 1st.
Yet French officials are adamant that "it will change absolutely nothing" regarding the four priorities of the presidency: shared policies on immigration, climate change and energy, the creation of a Mediterranean Union and progress on European defence.
The treaty was to have taken effect next January 1st, and Mr Sarkozy had hoped to oversee the choice of the EU's first long-term president of the Council and equivalent of a foreign minister.
"The big question for the French is whether you put all that practical work on ice," the European diplomat said. "And they have to face up to the distraction, the fact that Lisbon is going to make headlines at every summit. The message we see emerging is: 'There's a problem but no paralysis. We're trying to work and deliver for European citizens.'"
Friday's result was an almost personal defeat for Mr Sarkozy, who a year ago irritated his European partners by taking credit for devising what became the Lisbon Treaty. The text was meant to provide a way out of the impasse created by French and Dutch rejection of the constitutional treaty three years ago. Now he again has the opportunity to play the role of Europe's saviour.
French attitudes towards the Lisbon debacle range from an empathetic sense of déjà vu to amnesiac resentment towards little Ireland "which represents 1 per cent of the population of the Union" and risks wrecking it for everyone else.
The possible outcomes most discussed are: an Irish re-vote; an unprecedented "legal arrangement" to enable the treaty to be ratified without Ireland, and/or dumping it all in the lap of Brian Cowen. "It's always been practice in the Union that if a member state has a problem, it's up to the member state to come up with a solution," notes the European diplomat.
"You'll hear emotional, hysterical, excessive declarations," Hubert Védrine, who as France's foreign minister oversaw negotiation of the Nice Treaty, predicted.
"They'll say, 'We cannot let this little country stop the rest going forward,' but that's meaningless in international law, which requires unanimous ratification of treaties. At the end of the day, everyone will calm down."
Until now, Europe has advanced through what Mr Védrine calls "enlightened despotism". "European elites want to act as if they're in a federation. But it's not a federation. You cannot make peoples disappear. So we're going in circles," he said.
"We're wasting time looking for the ideal treaty when we should be concentrating our efforts on having policies on energy, on ecology, on how to act towards China . . . It's not treaties that prevent us doing so."
Though he regrets the Irish No vote, he thinks it's "an illusion" to think the future of Europe can be solved by treaties. The Irish vote may mark "the end of the utopian, federalist dream of a United States of Europe. For 10 or 15 years, people have been showing that they are happy to live in peace, to co-operate and have shared projects, but they don't want to be merged together. The elites don't accept this idea, so they keep trying to invent new mechanisms."