Sir, - Your Editorial (April 16th), says it is up to opponents of the Treaty of Nice to demonstrate that a No vote by Irish voters in the June 7th referendum would not be a rejection of the ambitions of the 12 EU applicant states to join the European Union. I support the enlargement of the EU if the applicant states get a fair deal in their negotiations, which their peoples find acceptable in fair and free referendums. For that very reason, I believe people should vote No to Nice.
Contrary to what the Government says, the Nice Treaty is not primarily an enlargement Treaty. Only eight of the 80 or so pages of the official treaty text deal with enlargement. Nice is rather a treaty that provides for the division of the EU into first-class and second-class members. It shifts voting power to the big states from the small. It centralises more law-making in Brussels by abolishing the national veto in some 30 areas, thereby reducing our democracy further.
It militarises the EU in a fundamentally new way by inserting provision for the 60,000soldier Rapid Reaction Force and an elaborate supporting military bureaucracy into the Union treaties for the first time. All this happens even if not a single applicant country joins the EU.
The Amsterdam Treaty, which we ratified by referendum in 1998, was, in fact, more favourable to an easy enlargement of the EU than the Treaty of Nice. Amsterdam provided that the EU could expand from 15 to 20 member-states without any further amendment of the treaties. Nice, by contrast, proposes the fundamental changes mentioned before the EU can expand from 15 members to 16.
Nice's provisions for a trebling of the votes of the big states while the votes of the small states only double, come into force automatically on January 1st, 2005, even if no new member has joined the EU by then. The two-class, two-tier EU provisions, so-called "enhanced co-operation", come into force immediately Nice is ratified, if it is ratified.
These "enhanced co-operation" provisions of Nice mark a radical break with the original European ideal of the EU as a partnership of legal equals, despite the differences in size and weight of its member-states.
The concept of EU partnership rested fundamentally on acceptance of the principle that no major change or new departure would be made without everyone agreeing. Nice abandons this by permitting an inner group led by Germany and France to make special arrangements among themselves, in effect to hijack the EU institutions, and then confront the rest of the EU thereafter with continual economic and political fait accomplis.
I suggest that this is the real political response of Germany and France to the prospect of EU enlargement - to move the goalposts in face of the 12 applicant states so as to avoid dealing with them on a plane of legal and political equality. It effectively puts the applicants in the position of seeking to join a club, some of whose members are engaged in forming another club inside the first one. Is that a fair deal?
The Nice Treaty lays down a clear path towards another EU treaty in 2004, where this inner group intend dividing the EU down the middle, adopting a constitution including the Fundamental Rights Charter and much else. Again Nice, if it ratified, clears a way for this to happen without the EU being enlarged by a single new applicant member.
No date has been fixed for the admission of any applicant country. The real obstacle to a major enlargement is Poland's 2 million farmers and their effect on the CAP. The admission terms of the applicants will be settled in their accession treaties, as happened in our own case, not in the Treaty of Nice. Economically, EU enlargement is much more about opening the West to the East than the East to the West.
The Government is pushing Nice as an EU enlargement treaty because it fears that if the people become aware of its real contents, they will overwhelmingly reject it. That is why the Government is holding four different, unrelated, referendums on the same day. It is why it is rushing through the referendum on Nice to deny sufficient time for proper public examination of what is in it. - Yours etc.,
Anthony Coughlan, Secretary, The National Platform, Crawford Avenue, Dublin 9