Battleground staked out for EU reform

WORLDVIEW:IT WAS as if the referendum campaign was already under way. Speakers and audiences at two meetings in Dublin this week, with a passion and eloquence that we normally associate with the contest when it is already under way, staked out the likely battleground in what will be a fierce battle.

(Whether or not a referendum actually happens appears increasingly likely to be decided by the unpredictable Supreme Court, although my layman’s reading of the Crotty judgment suggests it will probably not be legally required).

On Monday in Trinity College Dublin former German vice-chancellor Joschka Fischer, one of Europe’s most feisty and articulate champions of integration and full political union, and a man who enjoys nothing more than a good scrap, addressed a packed audience of academics, students, politicians and campaigners.

Europe, he argued, is hovering “on the brink”, at a critical crossroads in its history, in what is at root a “political crisis” that poses the question of the euro and the EU’s very survival. And Ireland too will pay a heavy price if it turns away from further integration. “You will not end up in heaven. You will end up in a very different place,” he said.

“Unless political power in Europe is Europeanised, with the current confederation evolving into a federation, the euro zone – and the EU as a whole – will disintegrate,” he wrote recently.

He was ably complemented by my colleague Paul Gillespie and by the head of operations in the EU’s new diplomatic service, David O’Sullivan.

And on Thursday, also in Trinity, German ambassador Dr Eckhart Lübkemeier, while repeatedly emphasising non-interference in Ireland’s affairs and in a more diplomatic form, delivered a similar message: the only way forward lies in repairing the defects at the heart of the euro’s construction, the failure to create a genuine political/fiscal union.

Not, both ambassador and Fischer stressed, that the crisis, imported from the US and rooted in failures to regulate, was caused by the euro. Both spoke of German willingness at political and public levels to contribute to a solution – of the critical imperative that the European Union represents as a core value to all the main parties, and confidently of a public willing to be persuaded of the necessity, as it would see it, to bail out the project. Gillespie warned rightly that unless Irish voters understand that the treaty they will be asked to vote on provides for more than just rules imposing fiscal discipline, and explicitly opens the way for a German commitment to some form of deeper political union and of euro bonds, they are likely to reject it.

At Davos, Chancellor Merkel, however, was suggesting again it would be negligent to agree further rescue efforts – such as doubling the bailout fund – without first agreeing fiscal reforms to win back market trust. You jump first, she appears to be saying, we will perhaps follow – a choreography that may suit her domestically but could prove difficult here.

Fischer’s emphasis also on the critical need to make the reform an enhancement of accountability and of the EU’s internal democracy is well made. He called for the establishment of a second chamber in the European Parliament to represent national parliaments. And he angrily disputed one audience member’s characterisation of the EU as just a club of imperial powers.

Perhaps the most entertaining, some might say strange, moment of the night was the sight of Declan Ganley leaning forward in his front row seat to explain earnestly to Fischer that what was needed was not the sort of tinkering that the fiscal treaty would offer, but the placing of a bold vision in front of the people of Europe for a radical shift to a federal Europe. We need someone at European level to promote such a vision, Ganley said, “perhaps it could be you.” Strange bedfellows indeed.

And yet to be fair to him, though it may pain me, Ganley’s recent manifesto for a federal Europe is not the dramatic break with the past that many have suggested. During the Lisbon campaigns he protested regularly at being described as a Eurosceptic and did set out some radical federalising ideas in his published literature.

But that message was drowned out by the thrust of the campaign and the reality that, both at home and in mainland Europe, the deeply Eurosceptical company he kept was singing off an entirely different hymn sheet. These will hardly be the troops for the new pan-European movement he has hinted at.

Ganley’s federalism was also a puzzle to Yes campaigners who wondered at the contradiction involved in opposing a treaty that significantly extended democratic accountability through strengthening the European Parliament. How could he move the union from its present imperfection to his vision without passing through a Lisbon, however inadequate?

And does that strange logic – that the good or partial is the enemy of the perfect – mean he will now also campaign against the mildly federalising fiscal compact? Watch this space.