Thu, Jun 02, 2005 page9

• The EU constitution was never a done deal

  • By Peter Preston / THE GUARDIAN
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  The great referendum debate, in truth, has never been about trading a few votes here or there. It has always been about winning the argument in 25 different countries. And that's where the Dutch and Czechs and Brits, doubters with a right to a say, pile in behind Paris. That's why France's performance, even before the last ballot boxes are counted, has been such a dead loss. Who can remember, or trust, a single word French President Jacques Chirac says?

  Yet sometimes, even in the extremities of political despair, you smile and tell yourself that serious events shouldn't always be treated seriously. The constitutional treaty, under attack from left, right and bemused center, was never going to get round the two-year obstacle course of electoral approval unscathed. It's a dud, a dodo, an impossible dream (as well as a morass of verbiage).

  So turn again, and think again.

  We're told that failure to ratify must mean disaster -- and years of drifting decay. We're told that either the project retains momentum or it wallows in the mire, that the EU itself could end in disillusion. (Do you recall how the Soviet Union simply disintegrated?) Ho hum. It's time for that serious smile.

  What really goes down the pan with Giscard's discard? The difficulty has always been that this desert of text conceals only an arid agenda for change. Take away a European foreign minister, a full-time president of the council, a scrapping of various minor vetoes and, after 2014, a smaller commission, and what have you got left? Not a fat lot -- a charter of rights that might or might not make a difference, some added powers for national parliaments they might or might not choose to exercise and better defense and security planning that will probably happen in any case.

  Of course, it would be better to sign up blithely and move on. Of course, rejection batters many reputations and presages much turmoil.

  But the blow is emotional and symbolic rather than practical or crucial.

  Europe's single foreign supremo is never going to supplant his British, French or German masters when the chips are down on Iraq or Middle East peace or relations with Bombardier George W. Bush. He's there to manage the small change of diplomatic cooperation around the world.

  He's no match for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- just as, come to think of it, Rice is no match for her predecessor Colin Powell, because Bush's second administration has already lost clout and direction.

  Does it make sense to have a more permanent president of the council based in Brussels rather than swap Europe's titular leadership every six months? Yes; but the difference is more administrative than ideological (and in no way crucial, except as a job opportunity for retired prime ministers). Are many of the scrapped vetoes vital? No; even our own, dear Tory party wouldn't claim that in detail.

  The big point, then, is that there isn't a big, substantive point. The trouble lies in faith and vision and explanation, not in the horrors of lurking subclauses. A project deficiency. And we can't, any longer, do the faith thing without going back to basics.

  The European Community, and its successor the EU, rose from the ashes of a continent laid waste by repeated war. It sought to close the fault lines for ever, to merge national interests into a single interest of peaceful and prosperous intent. Inevitably, its definition of Europe left out the lost lands of the east. This was western Europe; this was Bonn and Paris getting their acts together.

  But dismantle the Berlin wall, reunite Germany and bring Poland and Hungary (let alone Romania, Croatia, Ukraine and Turkey) into the ambit of this "ever closer union," and it all changes. The new EU is a tremendous spreader of democratic practice and market reform, but its flame has flickered away. It is something different now, not more of the same.

  Here's where anyone following the French debate has found such perplexity. It has often seemed as though -- two oblivious years too late -- France was deciding whether to let Poland inside the club. Here's where old ideas -- such as the wonder of a common currency -- have struggled to cope with a multiplicity of new and very different economies. Here's where one size (for Bulgaria and Belgium, say) can't remotely fit all far into the future. Here's why Warsaw's idea of a competitive society simply doesn't match the German SPD's approach just over the border. Here's why job mobility between states has become such a brutal, racist vexation.

  The incoherence is fundamental, the tendency -- wondrously illustrated during France's debate -- to impose sinister constructions on the most blameless and boring of paragraphs irresistible. This is the new bespoke Europe, with Cyprus for fear of the Turks and Turkey in search of a national identity and the Baltic tiddlers looking apprehensively over their shoulders at Moscow. The motivations for joining and participating are cut 25 ways; so is what British Prime Minister Tony Blair likes to call the "heart" of the project.

  None of this, if you can still smile, is fatal. All of it can and should be part of building a future where history never ends. But we can't do that by mystic diktat. "Old" Europe, by chance, is clapped out for the moment, with a defeated German chancellor building his own knacker's yard and a French president building only contempt.

  Reassessment couldn't look more inopportune or disquieting.

  But to hell with that. You can't run on empty indefinitely. You have to pause, refuel and travel on. You have to smile over what has been achieved and what more can be made of a unique engine of hope.

  It ain't broke, but it needs all our fixing.
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