Sir, - Enlarging the European Union to incorporate several East European states is a good thing, the Taoiseach said in his recent address to the European Movement (The Irish Times, November 7th). I suggest it is a bad thing, both for them and for us, for the following reasons:
It is bad for the East Europeans because it deprives the citizens of these applicant states of their hard-won national democracy and independence. Before joining the EU they must adopt some 20,000 EU directives and regulations, amounting to around 100,000 pages of legal text, without changing a jot or tittle. They must also commit themselves in principle to abolishing their national currencies, so that the European Central Bank, whose policies are geared mainly to suit Germany and France, will exercise unfettered economic dominion over them. Is this not an economic and political servitude more drastic than anything they had to endure when they were clients of the former USSR and members of COMECON?
The East European governing elites, who have made such a mess of running their own economies since 1989, see the EU as a deus ex machina. They picture themselves as happily helping to run an enlarged EU, alongside Ireland's governing elite and that of the other West European members, while in future they can blame their domestic problems on Brussels. Meanwhile their populations grow ever more disillusioned, as they begin to realise how EU membership will erode their national democracy and independence. Opinion polls show most Poles and Estonians to be now opposed to joining the EU.
There is no significant economic gain for Ireland in enlargement. Poland has 2 million farmers, almost as many as in the whole of the EU. Absorbing them must wreck what is left of the Common Agricultural Policy, which was the principal economic attraction for this country of the original EEC. With enlargement, whatever EU Structural Funds are available will have to be spread more thinly. Irish taxpayers will soon have to pay more money to Brussels than it pays to us.
But the more fundamental reason why EU enlargement is not in our interest is that, as the Taoiseach himself acknowledged in his speech: "An increase in the size of the EU will undoubtedly reduce the direct influence of each individual member-state by itself. That is inevitable."
How can it be in Ireland's interest to have our voting weight reduced on the Council of Ministers, which makes EU laws, in order to give greater voting weight to Germany, France and the larger member-states, as is proposed in the forthcoming Treaty of Nice? How can it be in our interest to abolish the national veto in some 30 policy areas hitherto requiring unanimity? This means the end of any national democratic control over those areas. It means that even if the Irish people do not want something, even if the Dail does not want it, and the Government does not want it, and even if the Irish Minister on the EU Council of Minister votes against it, it can still go through and become an EU law that is binding on Ireland and Irish citizens because a majority of other EU governments have voted for it. In other words, it means agreeing to rule by foreigners in the policy areas concerned.
May I suggest that it manifestly is not in Ireland's interest to abolish the national veto in order to permit the Germans, French and some others to establish an avant-garde or inner-core quasifederal EU superstate among themselves, so as to be able to confront those unwilling to go that far with an endless series of political and economic faits-accomplis? By abolishing the present unanimity requirement for any such move, the proposed Treaty of Nice would effectively open a path to the transformation of the EU from what is - in form at least - a partnership of equals, into a two-tier union. It would in effect permit Germany and France to hijack the EU treaties and institutions - the Commission, Council, Court and Parliament - to facilitate them in their EU superstate-building plans, instead of their forming a quasi-federation outside the EU treaties, if that is what they really want to do. - Yours, etc.,
Anthony Coughlan, The National Platform, Crawford Avenue, Dublin 9.