WorldView: Portugal's prime minister, José Sócrates, has just taken over the rotating presidency of the European Union, writes Tony Kinsella.
His primary task will be to oversee the drafting of the new mini-treaty, a treaty which only Irish voters will be asked to ratify by referendum. The EU has grown in half a century from a six-country structure centred on preventing further Franco-German wars to an evolving expression of 27 democratic, mixed-economy states and their 500 million citizens.
It is considerably more than a classic international organisation where each member wields a veto, yet remains considerably less than a nation state. The accurate term to describe it is the little-used word "polity". It is, and probably will be for some time, a work in progress, a unique democratic building site, constantly changing and evolving.
This polity has yet to invent a satisfactory system for updating and adapting its basic rulebooks and so finds itself relying on the ancient process of treaty negotiations.
Detailed EU treaty negotiations are carried out by national officials meeting at an inter-governmental conference, or IGC. The IGC hammers out the text under close scrutiny from the national capitals. When IGC members cannot reach agreement, the problems are referred upwards to national governments.
Treaties are binding agreements negotiated between sovereign nation states. They bind the contracting states rather than their governments, as nobody would be prepared to negotiate a treaty only to have it abrogated by the next government. If bilateral treaties between two states can be difficult to negotiate and ratify, their multi-lateral cousins, such as those negotiated between the EU's 27 member states, are models of complexity.
Debate about what a treaty should contain has to be carried out during the negotiation phase, for once agreement is reached on the text of a treaty, that text must be ratified on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
The essence of the new treaty is the reforms suggested by the EU's first attempt at a more open drafting procedure, the 2001-2003 European Convention, which produced the 2004 Constitutional Treaty. The name was pretentious, not to say unfortunate. It did, however, mirror the novel nature of the EU, being more than a simple treaty while remaining considerably less than a constitution.
Eighteen EU members have ratified the treaty, Luxembourg and Spain by referendum. France and the Netherlands rejected it by referendum, binding in the French case, consultative in the Dutch one. Seven members, including Ireland, suspended their consideration of the treaty following the French and Dutch vetoes.
The basis for the new treaty, as agreed by the European summit in Brussels last June, seeks to remove the more controversial aspects that the French and Dutch rejected, while retaining the institutional and procedural reform packages.
There is a wide variety of ratification procedures across the EU's 27 member states, ranging from simple to qualified majorities in parliaments to national referendums. In Ireland, the Oireachtas has the power to ratify treaties by a simple majority, but the people alone can amend the Constitution by means of a referendum.
The argument could be made that not all EU treaties involve amending Bunreacht na hÉireann, but the practice has now become one of placing all such treaties before the people. Irish referendums have no qualification threshold - the 1979 referendums on adoption and Seanad elections were carried on less than a 29 per cent turnout. In theory, two voters voting in favour with one voting against would be sufficient to amend our Constitution.
The French constitution provides for two amendment procedures - either a national referendum, or approval by a three-fifths majority of the National Assembly and the Senate meeting in Congress. The choice of procedure is at the president's discretion, although the practice has been that major questions are decided by referendum, while more technical changes, such as reducing the presidential term from seven to five years, are decided by Congress.
In December 2004, Portugal's constitutional court ruled that the country's constitution prevented a referendum on treaties. The Portuguese constitution has since been amended to allow for such referendums, but a decision is binding only if more than half of the registered electors vote.
Referendums have a mixed history across Europe. The 1950 experience in Belgium, when the country split on Flemish/Walloon lines over the future of King Leopold III, ended the use of referendums in that country. Belgian approval of the EU constitutional treaty involved qualified majority votes in the federal, regional and linguistic community assemblies.
Since the Nazi regime was adept at manipulating plebiscites, there is no provision for - and considerable hostility towards - referendums in Germany. German treaty ratification requires a two-thirds majority of deputies in the Bundestag and a similar majority among the representatives of the federal Länder in the Bundesrat.
Referendums are consultative rather than binding in most EU members, including Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK. The 2005 Dutch referendum was the first in that kingdom for more than 200 years. These different political systems and traditions make it extremely difficult to introduce the oft-suggested proposal of an EU referendum, held on a single day across the whole union.
Such EU-wide referendums could create as many problems as they would solve. What would the status of a decision be if a narrow majority in favour emerged from a low turnout across most of the EU, with a high negative turnout in certain member states?
Federal referendums in Switzerland require, in practice rather than in law, not only a majority in favour, but also a majority in the cantons of at least one of the country's two linguistic minority communities.
In countries where referendums are regular events, such as in Switzerland or Ireland, voters have a tendency to express themselves primarily on the question put to them. Where referendums are infrequent events, voters often express themselves on issues other than the actual referendum question - such as the popularity of their government.
There is a clear need to develop a better, and more European, method of dealing with EU treaty reform. It might be possible to arrive at a system where a qualified majority in the European Parliament, endorsed by qualified majorities in national parliaments, could validate technical reforms agreed by member state governments.
A blocking minority of, say, 15 per cent in both the European Parliament and in five national parliaments could provide a failsafe way to prevent abuses of such a system.
Ireland would, of course, hold a referendum on such a system - a referendum on reducing the numbers of future referendums.