Lisbon explained - part 9:The big fear among Irish diplomats is that a No vote would prompt some states to seek to move ahead with further integration, leaving Ireland isolated and outside the EU mainstream, writes JAMIE SMYTH, European Correspondent.
THE EYES of Europe will be on Ireland when voters go the polls on June 12th to decide the fate of the Lisbon Treaty.
The 26 other member states have all decided to ratify the blueprint for reform of the European Union through their national parliaments: some, through fear of a repeat of the French and Dutch vote against the EU constitution in 2005; others, simply because that is their constitutional tradition.
Half of them have already ratified the treaty, piling the pressure on the Government to deliver an Irish Yes.
Few diplomats are prepared to consider the possibility that Ireland, which has so clearly benefited from EU membership of the European Union, would reject Lisbon.
But what if the unthinkable happens? José Manuel Barroso told The Irish Times recently that there was no plan B if voters rejected the treaty, apparently suggesting that the treaty would fall. As others have pointed out, Lisbon is plan B, conjured up when plan A, the constitution, was defeated.
Barroso also warned that Ireland's standing in the EU would be affected by a decision to veto a reform that every other member of the European Union had agreed to pursue after six years of tough negotiations.
Then minister for foreign affairs Dermot Ahern diverged from the official Government position that a defeat for the Lisbon Treaty would be a "disaster for the country".
In an interview with the Minister during his visit to Argentina for St Patrick's week, the English-language Buenos Aires Herald quoted him as saying: "There would be no dire consequence should the referendum go amiss".
Ahern told the newspaper that, "life will go on as it did after the French and Dutch rejected the European constitutional treaty in 2005".
That is not a universal view, however, with many fearing at the very least a loss of influence in Brussels. Political influence and goodwill from fellow member states may be largely intangible, but both have been crucial to Ireland's record in punching well above its weight over time both in terms of extracting benefits for the country and in influencing EU policy.
Diplomats point to the experience of France, when it failed to carry its vote on the EU constitution. "No one in Brussels listened to France or President Chirac after its referendum. Only when Sarkozy came to power was France taken seriously again," says one EU diplomat.
Within the institutions, for example, Ireland has been been particularly successful in placing people in key positions. The current secretary general of the commission, the EU's top civil servant, is Catherine Day, who in 2005 replaced David O'Sullivan, holder of the post for the previous five years. Charlie McCreevy was also handed the plum job of internal market commissioner while former taoiseach John Bruton is EU ambassador to the US.
No doubt all won promotion on merit, but in Brussels politics is always also a factor in jobs and a No vote could make it more difficult for the Government to lobby for senior EU jobs.
The Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, is well aware of the danger of losing influence in Brussels at a time when big policy issues such as the reform of the common agricultural policy and a plan to harmonise the corporate tax base in the EU are about to be published.
A Yes vote would assist the Government in securing its objectives in these talks, he has insisted.
He is probably right.
Wringing concessions from EU partners is never easy but seeking them after your country has just plunged the European Union into a political crisis would make Irish diplomats' job significantly tougher.
A defeat for Lisbon would plunge the EU into a similar crisis of confidence to the one that it faced when the constitution was voted down.
Some warn the EU would grind to a halt under the current decision-making provisions while others insist the EU is working fine and no further reform would be necessary.
Regardless of that wider debate, the danger is that EU leaders would become locked in endless negotiations on how best to reform the European Union.
"It would have negative implications for everyone because Europe would be frozen again. It would lose credibility abroad in trying to implement its policies and it could even have an economic impact," says Jerome Chauvin, a legal expert at the employers' group BusinessEurope, which says Europe needs to put institutional debates behind it and concentrate on the major challenges such as combating climate change and globalisation.
The most likely outcome if Lisbon is rejected by Irish voters on June 12th is probably a continuation of the current situation, with the EU relying on the more cumbersome decision-making provisions of the Nice Treaty, albeit with a lot of ill-feeling towards Ireland. Some, limited provisions of the treaty could legally be introduced without a new treaty, but its main decision-making procedures would remain unaltered.
There is no appetite for convening yet another conference of EU states to try to agree a new treaty.
In practical negotiating terms, even if such a process were to be initiated, Ireland would be faced by 26 partners, each of whom had ratified the existing text, and who would be anxious not to jeopardise a hard-won compromise by picking it apart.
It also seems unlikely politically that we could be asked to vote again on the same treaty in a repeat of the situation when we initially rejected the Nice Treaty, only to pass it 18 months later.
No single issue has emerged during the referendum campaign that could be encapsulated in a simple protocol like that negotiated on neutrality before the re-run of the Nice II referendum.
The big fear among Irish diplomats is that a No vote would prompt some states to seek to move ahead with further integration, leaving Ireland isolated and outside the EU mainstream. "I think an Irish No vote would call into question Ireland's EU membership," says Andrew Duff, a British MEP that helped to draft Lisbon. "There would be a move from some federalists to call for a smaller core EU group, something like the Charlemagne club that existed before 1973. . . This would create an extremely grave situation."
The creation of a two-tier or multispeed EU, with Ireland firmly in the outside tier, would be a radical step and one that could create major tensions between different states. In the current climate, it would also prove difficult given that relations between France and Germany - the traditional twin engines of European integration - are strained over a number of important issues.
But there are precedents for groups of states to move ahead with deeper integration, not least the 15 states that have adopted the euro, while the Schengen free travel area started with a core group of states.
Under such a scenario, Ireland would probably continue to benefit from the EU's internal market but might be expected to take a back seat when it comes to co-operating in more sensitive areas such as foreign affairs and the field of justice, liberty and security. It would certainly lose the influence that it has built up over 35 years of EU membership.
To argue there would be no price to pay for rejecting the treaty would certainly be to overstate the case.