ALAN M. DUKES,
Sir, - Anthony Coughlan (August 5th) accuses me of "misunderstanding" how the Nice Treaty "militarises the EU". With all due respect, I have to say that his accusation is rather disingenuous, coming as it does from one who has recently had to admit that his claim, repeated at every European referendum for the past 30 years, that successive treaties have compromised Ireland's neutrality, is without foundation.
Mr Coughlan (as I pointed out on July 29th) has now come to realise that Irish participation in a mutual defence pact would require a referendum. He implicitly accepts that we are not currently involved in any such pact, and that the Nice Treaty does not propose any such involvement. Thus, claims made during the debate on this Treaty by Mr Coughlan and by other participants such as the Peace and Neutrality Alliance, AfrI, the Green Party, Sinn Feín and others can be seen to be false.
The new 2001/2002 "spin" on this scare is that, in Mr Coughlan's words, the Nice Treaty "turns the EU into an alliance for military offence, not defence". He attempts to justify this extraordinary claim by claiming that "peace-making" as envisaged in the Petersberg Tasks "requires the EU to go to war to establish peace between two belligerents".
Would the prevention of the Srebrenice massacre have constituted an act of war in Mr Coughlan's eyes? If prevention of that massacre would, in his eyes, have been an offensive act, what term would he use to describe the massacre itself?
Peace-keeping, peace-making and crisis management operations of the kind envisaged in the Petersberg Tasks are not acts of military offence. Neither can they be qualified as what Mr Coughlan describes as "the military-political power-play of the bigger EU states".
The alleged "militarisation" of the EU includes the establishment of a political and security committee to "exercise political control and strategic direction" of the military operations of the Rapid Reaction Force. Mr Coughlan apparently objects to that. I don't. I find it perfectly normal and prudent to have such a committee for that purpose. That committee already existed on an ad-hoc basis, having been set up after the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty. Its formalisation by inclusion in the Nice Treaty framework was one of the "Amsterdam leftovers" well signalled in advance of the Nice Treaty.
We should, perhaps, be thankful that the old chimera of the "resource wars" has not been resurrected on this occasion. The old chestnut of the Danish opt-out from foreign and security policy issues, however, gets its ritual mention from Mr Coughlan. Perhaps he has forgotten that Denmark is a member of NATO? - Yours, etc.,
ALAN M. DUKES,
Tully West,
Kildare.