The Boring Reality of the Lisbon Treaty

Don't get me wrong but the EU is boring, really boring. There's lots of people trying to figure out how to make the EU more accessible to its citizens and who despair at how little attention the EU gets at national level, but then they forget just how boring the EU can be. Seventy years ago Europe was more interesting, but we'll get to that in a moment.

The Lisbon Treaty is an example of what the EU does best: it's mind numbingly boring. It's very long, fairly complicated and almost certain to send you asleep even if you've drunken five red bulls and a few expressos beforehand. The Treaty's a compromise built on another compromise which amends a few old compromises which were themselves based on previous compromises. It's a compromise between big states and small states. Between northern states and southern ones. Between left-wing governments and right-wing ones. Between states with official churches and those with secular constitutions. Between those who would like to see more entrenched workers' rights and those would like to have freer, less regulated markets. Compromise is inherent to the European Union and to the Lisbon Treaty, and it would be difficult to understand either without realising this.

Of course compromise has its downsides. The text is frequently vague and many of its objectives, in the eyes of many, conflict. Thus the EU is pledged to further economic development and sustainable development, free markets and social protection, free and fair trade, and so on. This ambiguousness is what allows opponents of the Treaty to make contradictory statements about what the Treaty means, but is in reality misconstrued. The vagueness exists to allow a degree of latitude in implementing policy choices. What policies get implemented will depend, more on the composition of the European Parliament and Council of Ministers than on any biased and nitpicking interpretations of the treaties. Regardless of what happens on October 2nd, whether trade conducted by European countries is freer or fairer will depend what the European Commission and EU member states, acting together, do on the trade front, and not on any form of words in Nice or Lisbon. If we want a more left-ring or a more right-wing Europe, we'll have to vote and campaign that way.

The Lisbon Treaty is, like all of the other treaties before it, a vehicle for doing things. It sets broad aims on what we desire to achieve and sets the ball rolling. What the EU is doing in five, ten or twenty years times is up to us. I don't like everything that the EU does, no more than I believe that all Irish laws are just and fair, but approving or rejecting Lisbon isn't about whether you dislike this or that policy, but about whether you think the EU should exist as a vehicle for achieving things that simply couldn't be achieved without it, and whether you believe Lisbon will make the EU more effective. You're not going to like everything that the EU does. What it's really about is believing that the project is worthwhile.

There is an old joke on the internet about a Jewish man called Ikey reading a newspaper on a park bench. His friend, who is also Jewish, is walking past and is startled to discover that Ikey is reading an anti-Semitic newspaper. When asked why, Ikey simply responds that other newspapers make him depressed but anti-Semitic newspapers say that Jews are all rich and run the world. In a similar vein the sobering reality of the Lisbon Treaty is that it isn't going to introduce conscription to a European army, re-introduce the death penalty, reduce the minimum wage to €1.84, increase our corporate tax rate, establish a European super-state, force us to accept gay-marriage or any of the other nonsense floating around the internet and on some posters. It just isn't that important. The much more modest reality is that the treaty will reform the EU's voting rules, give the European Parliament a much greater say in passing EU laws, give the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms legal force (with respect to EU law but not national law), and establish a position of European Council President to replace the current rotating system. Reality can be a bit boring too.

One of the recurring characteristics of EU referendum campaigns is how much the reality of the EU and our membership of it gets distorted. A trawl over claims made in previous referendum campaign's reveal the degree of repeated claims and thing which just didn't happen:

"The Amsterdam Treaty provides the European Union with an embryonic constitution of what, with the establishment of the single currency, will be well on the way to becoming a United States of Europe; and that is tantamount virtually to giving Ireland a new constitution also. The treaty gives legal personality to the European Union for the first time, founding it on principles instead of on its member states, which is a major constitutional step."

Anthony Coughlan, Letter to the editor of the Irish Times, 8 April 1998

"For the most part our people do not realise what is involved - that we hand over what freedom we have left to the faceless bureaucrats of Brussels, that we become a mere province of a new superstate, that our Constitution and Supreme Court become subservient to the European Court. This goes for our churches also."

Fr. Tom Ingoldsby, Letter to the editor of the Irish Times, 29 April 1998

"Politically and constitutionally, however, the most important thing the new treaty would do would be to give to the new European Union what it would establish the constitutional form of a supranational state for the first time, making this new union separate from and superior to its 27 member states. ... This would make the EU just like the United States of America..."

Anthony Coughlan (commenting on the then draft EU reform treaty), Irish Times article, 28 June 2007

A real debate merits and demerits of an international agreement between European leaders, gets buried under an phoney debate about neutrality and abortion. A heavily jaundiced understanding of how the European Union works becomes current, and internet conspiracy theories outweigh the experience of thirty-five years of membership. We get the opportunity to vote no against privatisation and to defend neutrality, even though our own democratically elected government privatised Telecom Éireann and allowed the Americans to use Shannon Airport, all without the EU pushing them one way or another.

Seventy years Europe was interesting but it didn't work. Today the European Union is boring but it works. The Lisbon Treaty is the fulmination of a long process of reform seeking to make the Union work better. It's very difficult to get anyone excited over it or write slogans for posters, but there it is.