Treaty creates a defence capacity for EU - lawyer

The Amsterdam Treaty continues the "unrelenting" process of previous treaties of creating a defence capacity for the EU, the Irish lawyer and peace campaigner, Mr Joe Noonan, warned yesterday.

Speaking at a Green Group debate in the European Parliament on "What role for Neutrality in the EU?", Mr Noonan said that "each treaty change since 1986 has brought that objective closer. Each step has been described by its promoters before ratification as a trivial or meaningless change, and after ratification is used as a building block for the next stage."

But that process was not inevitable, a Swedish diplomat, Ms Ulla Gudmundson, insisted. The creation of a military alliance, she argued, "is in the hands of the member-states" and can be only made under the terms of the Amsterdam Treaty by consensus. On the contrary, she said, the treaty was giving real substance to the Union's ability to contribute to crisis management, the real challenge in the current period.

Under Amsterdam, Mr Noonan said, "the next stage is becoming clear. The structure is coming into place. It will reach a point where the simplistic and dangerous logic of matching military and political weight to economic strength can be implemented. There will be little the neutral or non-aligned states can do then.

"If you create the structure and give over the decision-making power you cannot complain if you do not like the decisions. Perhaps one can `constructively abstain', perhaps withhold your soldiers from action. But the action will be taken in your name, and at least partly now at your expense.

"So much is certain if you are a citizen of a small state. For citizens of France, Germany and Britain you can relax in the knowledge that your leaders will in the real world consider themselves free to pursue their own national interests without much restraint."

Ms Gudmundson said that Sweden's neutrality had been seen as an obstacle to EU membership in the 1980s. Now the challenges were different and in the 1990s it is seen as an asset in contributing to an enhanced role in crisis management and peacekeeping. There were no new obligations to common defence in the Amsterdam Treaty, she said, and it was thus quite compatible with continued non-alignment.

Ms Patricia McKenna MEP took issue with her contention that military action by the Union would have to be sanctioned by UN mandate. "Nowhere in the treaty does it say that a UN mandate is required," Ms McKenna insisted.

Ms Magda Alvoet, a Belgian Green MEP, argued that "a civilian Union is the only way the EU can reconcile the political traditions of all our members."

The European security debate was failing to take account of the change in the nature of conflict, Mr Pertti Joenniemi, of the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, argued. The end of wars between states posed substantial challenges to both traditional proponents of military alliances and those of neutrality, he said.

"There is not much sense in forming alliances if the probability of inter-state wars is close to zero," Mr Joenniemi contended, "and no point in aspiring to neutrality if there are no real alliances left or power-political issues to be neutral about."