No one should be in doubt as to how much hangs on securing the ratification of the Nice Treaty. Failure to clear the way for EU enlargement in six months' time will leave our Government isolated in Europe, bereft of friends within a community of states where - as I know well from 10 years' experience as foreign minister and then as taoiseach - a huge amount depends on the goodwill of our partners, argues Garret Fitzgerald.
All the governments of applicant states and most, perhaps all, the governments of member states are deeply concerned to clear the way now for enlargement of the Union by admitting the 10 countries which are likely to be ready for accession by the end of this year.
If there is any truth in suggestions that one or two member states may be less enthusiastic for enlargement than they pretend, the governments of these states would be more than content to hide behind an Irish rejection of the Nice Treaty and would certainly join happily in condemning us for having blocked this project.
The only other people who will be glad to see us taking the blame for wrecking the enlargement process are those enthusiasts for a federal Europe who regard the modest Nice Treaty as inadequate and who are looking forward, in the event of our rejecting the treaty, to renegotiating it in order to make more radical changes to the present institutional structure - although I am inclined to think that their hopes of thus achieving a more federal Europe are illusory.
Hitherto the opponents of the Nice Treaty have made most of the running in the debate on the issue, helped by our outgoing Government's concern not to give the smaller anti-European left-wing parties any kind of a boost in the recent election by launching a premature debate on the issue.
It is, of course, easy for opponents of the treaty to frighten people with exaggerated or distorted accounts of what a complex document such as this actually contains. And it is easy also to exploit the concerns some people may have about existing aspects of our European involvement - concerns that have nothing to do with the contents of the Nice Treaty - with a view to getting them to use the referendum for a protest vote, especially if such voters can be lulled into thinking that a negative vote will have no penalty.
In fairness it must be said that many of those who oppose the treaty are idealists. The ideals to which they are attached are peace, human rights, development aid for the Third World and the global ecology issue. But the rest of us who support engagement with Europe are equally concerned with precisely these issues. And paradoxically, all four of these ideals are in fact post-second World War European constructs, developed and put into effect by Europe and finding limited echoes in either the United States or Russia.
Thus, where formerly war was endemic, the EU has created a zone of peace - not by using power to impose peace within western Europe, but by drawing upon its citizens' common revulsion against war. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain the pacific influence of the EU has spread to central and north-eastern Europe.
The Poles now live peacefully and co-operatively with the Ukrainians, with whom they used to quarrel, at times bloodily. And, with EU encouragement, the age-old hostility between Hungary and Romania has been ended.
Only in the western Balkans, not so long ago part of the poverty-stricken Turkish Empire, did violence re-emerge in Europe after 1989. In relation to human rights, Europe has led the world - not just the Europe of the EU but western Europe as a whole. For in 1950 that Europe established a supra-national jurisdiction to which its states submit themselves in order to secure the protection of their citizens' individual rights. This jurisdiction now extends to the whole of Europe, as does that of the new International Criminal Court, dealing with crimes such as genocide.
IN CONTRAST to Europe, the US wants no part in this. To these extraordinary innovations Europe has added a reversal of its colonial past, substituting colonial exploitation of the poor of the Third World by a reverse flow of development aid. Here again the initiative came from Europe. Europe today continues to supply a disproportionate share of aid to developing countries, and it has been from Europe that initiatives at debt relief have mainly emanated. The US remains far behind us in this respect.
Finally, the global ecological revolution is European in its origins, and Europe is leading the campaign to tackle pollution of the planet, against US opposition. These specifically European values, and the quite extraordinary political initiatives they inspired during the second half of the 20th century, together with a more widespread commitment to domestic social justice than one can find in most other parts of the world, co-exist with European citizens' legitimate concerns about economic prosperity.
The ideals and interests of the peoples of Europe have been well served by the Community established half a century ago, which we joined in 1973. Of course, like all human institutions it is imperfect; much needs to be done to make it work better. Development aid could be more generous - and less of it tied to the economic interests of European states. The limitations on arms exports to non-European countries which pose threats to their neighbours need to be tightened up. Greater efforts need to be made - by Ireland even more than many other countries - to control air and water pollution. And we need better provisions to handle humanely and efficiently the flow of immigrants from poorer countries overseas.
These are reforms for which we can work effectively - if we do not destroy our credibility and influence by voting against the Nice Treaty and enlargement next November. The question we will face is whether we can do more by remaining engaged with the process of creating a better Europe and a better world by deciding to join positively in the process of welcoming the liberated peoples of Central and Eastern Europe into our Union. Or whether we choose instead to reject once again the Nice Treaty, at the cost of making ourselves gratuitously unpopular with the rest of our continent, thus diminishing our capacity to promote our ideals and our interests in the Europe of the future. That is what we will be voting about in six months' time!
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie