There are unmistakable signs that a new issue is emerging on the European Union's agenda in the inter-governmental negotiations to reform the treaties. Flexibility would allow a smaller group of memberstates to go ahead with projects that others are unwilling or unable to sign up to, on condition that such closer co-operation remains open to them all. The principle was agreed in the Treaty of Amsterdam, but hedged with strict conditions. The current proposal to loosen them up, making it easier to use, is being pushed by France and Germany, but has quite broad support from Spain, the Benelux states, Italy and Portugal.
Ireland's position is very guarded so far. The Government is concerned that a more permissive use of flexibility would weaken the existing EU institutions and especially the European Commission by encouraging more initiatives outside them. Within the perspective of a rapidly enlarging EU, greater use of this method could encourage the emergence of a two-tier system, with the richer and most developed states occupying a privileged position. It is difficult to identify where precisely closer co-operation would be used and, if it were, whether that would be at the cost of making EU decision-making much more complicated and less transparent.
The case for flexibility is being presented as a means of ensuring that enlargement is accompanied by deeper integration of the EU and not used to dilute it. Venerable figures such as the former Commission president, Mr Jacques Delors, the former French president, Mr Giscard d'Estaing, and the former German chancellor, Mr Helmut Schmidt, have put it forward. They have called on the original six founding states to form a vanguard within the wider EU, in order to ensure forward momentum is not lost. The fact that the French and German governments have taken up these calls in recent weeks is significant indeed; it may have as much to do with renovating their partnership as with the principle of flexibility itself. They are determined to achieve a more radical outcome in the treaty-changing negotiations by keeping the initiative.
The emergence of a critical mass of member-states behind the need for closer co-operation within the EU, presents the Government with a clear dilemma. It has been an abiding feature of Ireland's EU policy that where there is a choice, this State should opt for the inner core of integration. So it was on the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1979, the Single Market in 1985 and single currency in 1999. Ireland is not involved in the Schengen system of free movement because of the need to preserve the Common Travel Area with the United Kingdom; belatedly this State accepted the principle of participation in the rapidly emerging EU security and defence domain.
To preserve this policy line, the access it guarantees and the interests it protects, it would be advisable not to oppose flexibility in principle, but to ensure its application does not damage the greater whole from whose structures and balances Ireland has so benefited. Widening the EU must be accompanied by deepening it if those interests are to be preserved. But it is not yet proven that flexibility is the most effective means to ensure that outcome.