Sir, - Dr Garret FitzGerald is mistaken in asserting (Opinion, June 2nd) that it is wrong to claim that five new states can join the EU under the provisions of the Treaty of Amsterdam without need for further amendment of the treaties. The National Platform's advice from authorities on EU law is otherwise.
Amsterdam was also an EU enlargement treaty. It remains in force if voters refuse to ratify Nice. The protocol on enlargement in the Treaty of Amsterdam provides that if new members join, whether five or fewer, there would be the usual reallocation of votes and EU Parliament seats that has accompanied all previous EU enlargements. It also provides for the big states to have one instead of two commissioners in the event of enlargement, and for them to be compensated "in a manner acceptable to all member-states" either by a reweighting of Council votes or by acceptance of a dual majority that would take population size into account. But the protocol makes clear that a new Treaty is called for only when the EU moves from 20 to 21 states. Then a grand conference has to be summoned to review the institutions, in which the five new members would take part.
Nice, by contrast, repeals the provisions of Amsterdam which make for this kind of "easy enlargement" of up to five new states - and five is the maximum likely to be ready by 2005. The protocol on enlargement in the Nice Treaty, which is also referred to as proof that Nice is primarily about EU enlargement in a letter in the same issue as Dr FitzGerald's article by Mr Declan Kelly, press counsellor at Foreign Affairs, repeals the protocol on enlargement of the Treaty of Amsterdam. It replaces it with radical changes to the EU that have the effect of making EU enlargement more difficult for the applicants. Logically and practically this must be so, for if Nice is ratified the applicants have to take Nice on board as well as all the earlier EU treaties before joining.
Dr FitzGerald points out that the Referendum Commission's advertisements say that the Nice Treaty "contains what EU Governments consider necessary for enlargement". EU Governments may say so, but it is not necessarily the commission's own view. The truth is that Nice is not legally necessary for enlargement, but it may be politically necessary for the big states, Germany and France in particular. Their political condition for allowing any major EU enlargement is Nice's "enhanced cooperation" provisions, which provide the necessary legal path to dividing the existing EU into an inner and outer circle - Jacques Delors's "union for the enlarged Europe and a federation for the avant-garde".
But why should Ireland's interests be subordinated to the political necessities of Germany and France? Although I have been a eurosceptic all my life, it is logical that I should prefer to keep the EU that we have, a partnership of at least legal equals, than open a way to having it hijacked by an inner club of big states in their own state power interests.
I suggest that Dr FitzGerald is confronted with a more tragic paradox. He has supported close North-South relations all his life. Yet if we ratify the Treaty of Nice, we not only abandon our veto on the division of the EU, we face ourselves with a cruel dilemma in 2004 when the plans for an inner-core quasifederation go ahead. Do we join the inner group, harmonise our corporate taxes with its members, give final decision on human rights matters to the EU Court and sunder ourselves possibly irreversibly from Northern Ireland (for Britain will surely never join an EU quasi-federation revolving around a BerlinParis axis)? Or do we stay outside with the UK, facing continually thereafter the political and economic faits-accomplis of the inner group?
There is surely an element of sad irony in seeing Dr FitzGerald, an Irish patriot and lifelong passionate European, urging us to vote Yes to a treaty that is likely to confront us soon with this dilemma if it is ratified. - Yours, etc.,
Anthony Coughlan, Secretary, The National Platform, Crawford Avenue, Dublin 9.
