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EU Constitutional Treaty

My Lords, when I first saw the Motion on the Order Paper for today, I rather thought that the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, would emulate Mark Anthony; he would be here to bury Caesar, not to praise him. He has not disappointed me. My own inclination would be rather the contrary, but I will resist the temptation to dwell at length on the merits of the constitutional treaty. Nor will I spend a lot of time speculating on the state of the corpse, if corpse it truly be. To change the literary metaphor, I am struck by the resemblance of those who anxiously question whether the treaty is really, really dead to the characters in Dracula who visit a graveyard and disinter bodies in order to drive a stake through their hearts. It is more useful to consider the future of institutional change in the European Union. For that reason, I thank the noble Lord for the opportunity he has provided. To avoid any misunderstanding, I should make it clear that I do not believe that there is any chance at all of the constitutional treaty, which was signed at Rome in November 2004 by 25 member states and since ratified by most of them, ever entering into force. There is not the slightest sign of either the French or Dutch Governments, whose electorates rejected the treaty by substantial majorities, being willing to resubmit the text for approval, or of their electorates being prepared to do so if it was so submitted. Nor do I believe that those member states that are still moving ahead with ratification or are pressing the case for completing the process actually expect the treaty as such ever to enter into force. Rather, they are trying to establish a benchmark against which to test alternative ways of bringing about institutional change. Let us turn away from necrophilia or necrophobia and look at the future in practical terms. First, I shall make one or two negative points. I suggest that it would be a great mistake if the European Union were to plunge prematurely into a new institutional negotiation. There have been far too many of them in the recent past. That has confused and irritated the general public, who find these games of institutional tiddlywinks not much to their taste. The Union needs to get better at delivering practical benefits from its policies, and to find a way back on to the path of economic growth and prosperity that brought it such strong support in earlier decades, before returning to the institutional issue. Secondly, I suggest that the Union should eschew tidying-up exercises. These matter a lot to civil servants and lawyers, but less to politicians and electorates who are suspicious of them. Thirdly, it should avoid confusing hyperbole. The treaty was a treaty and not a constitution. It was called a constitution to please those who wished it had been one. It ended by satisfying neither those who wanted one nor those who are determined not to have one. The title became a liability and surely should not be revived. Fourthly, I suggest that the Union should not risk creating legal confusion, as the charter of rights could have done, shrouded as it was in so much ambiguity about its justiciability or lack of it. Meanwhile, it is important for the Union to introduce institutional changes when these are intrinsically justifiable and are acceptable to the governments of member states while acting within the existing treaties. Such changes would include the holding of legislative sessions of the Council in public and the introduction of a subsidiarity test involving national parliaments. I do not see why they should not also involve inviting Javier Solana, the High Representative for common foreign and security policy, to chair meetings of the External Relations Council, and rationalising some of the external representation of the Union in places where both the Commission and the Council have overseas missions or where both Community and CFSB functions need to be carried out. There are objections to this kind of pragmatic process from both sides of the argument. Sceptics want everything frozen as it is; maximalists fear that their ambitious projects will wither on the vine if more practical steps are taken. I find both arguments unconvincing and difficult to reconcile with any genuine desire to see the Union become more effective and successful. But institutional change requiring treaty amendment will, in due course, be needed, because no body such as the Union can hope to develop and survive without the capacity to adapt itself to changed circumstances and new challenges. It will be needed because any further enlargement beyond the accession of Romania and Bulgaria will necessitate it in legal terms. The distribution of votes in the Council and the size of the Commission will have to adjusted, by law. Beyond that, the anomaly of rotating presidencies will become more marked. A system that provides for the governance of almost every European Union body by a group involving nearly 30 members will become ever less defensible, and the need to ensure that matters requiring a unanimous decision are reduced to a genuine minimum will become more pressing. Since all sides of the House support the further enlargement of the Union, and since the negotiations for Croatia’s accession could well be completed relatively quickly, that should concentrate our minds powerfully. Then of course the issue will arise for us, as for a number of other member states, as to whether any such institutional changes should require to be approved by referendum, or whether they should be ratified in a way that a whole series of previous institutional changes, several of them a good deal more ambitious and far-reaching than those ones are likely to be, and approved by parliamentary decision. The supporters of decision by referendum like to argue that their position is a principled one, but I have noticed that when the idea of a Europe-wide referendum is mentioned, their enthusiasm evaporates rapidly. Could it possibly be that their position is determined more by their calculation of the probable outcome than by attachment to a particular constitutional practice? That certainly seems to have been the case with the French decision to require a referendum before ratifying any more accession treaties after that with Croatia. It would surely be a good thing for this country if the demise of the constitutional treaty, which for all its shortcomings I personally regret, could enable us to have a more dispassionate and analytical public debate on these matters than has hitherto been the case. If the noble Lord’s initiative today opens the way to such a debate, that will be a major advance. Europe is currently suffering from a leadership deficit, and I would hope that Britain would play a role in remedying that; but we shall not succeed in doing so as long as divisions between and within the main parties in this country act like a ball and chain around the ankle of whoever is the Prime Minister of the day.