Inevitably, there remain many within the boundaries of the EU who go beyond mere disappointment to an outright rejection of that process that began at Laeken (that’s in Belgium, by the way) and ended up, through many twists and turns that included a rejected EU Constitution, with the Lisbon Treaty. Most prominent in this regard are the Czechs, if only because Czech president Václav Klaus was the last obstacle to the ratification of that treaty, holding out until only one month ago. Klaus was finally forced to knuckle under, but Czech anti-Lisbon opinion will not let this day pass without at least one more loud cry of protest. Thus it is that we get this article in today’s on-line edition of the Czech daily Lidové noviny. (Those signs brandished in the photo up top read “We want a Europe of free nations” and “We don’t want EU vetoes/prohibitions”; and the Czech word “dost” that’s also there simply means “enough.”)

That this sort of piece should appear on lidovky.cz is no surprise, since that newspaper – otherwise quite a mainline Czech broadsheet worth recommending, by the way – has through the years consistently provided a platform for the writings of Václav Klaus, whether in or out of power. This time it’s not Klaus himself who wrote the article – he’s still president, after all, so that would truly be rather too awkward – but instead one Michal Petřík, an advisor to President Klaus.

Petřík spends about the last third of his piece delivering rather thick Czech legal prose seemingly designed to prove either that the country’s supreme court was wrong to dismiss a last-minute appeal to it that the Lisbon Treaty is incompatible with the Czech Republic’s constitution, or that the final concessions granted to the Czechs to get them finally to sign (involving certain derogations from the EU’s Document of Fundamental Rights) were actually not forthcoming – or both, it’s hard to make out. But many of his points from the first part of the article are actually relevant and well-taken.

Complaints against the Lisbon Treaty? Anyone who has been paying attention at all over the past eight years, whether they are otherwise for the Treaty or against, can surely come up with a few. Yes, when the ratification process for the EU Constitution hit a dead end with its rejection in the French in Dutch referenda of mid-2005, what ultimately happened was that most of its provisions were simply re-packaged in a “treaty” form that would have a lower threshold for ratification. And yes, where that subsequent threshold still required a national referendum and that referendum result turned out to be “No” (as in Ireland), those same electors were inevitably offered another chance to vote “correctly.”

Petřík does deal here with that first point (although, surprisingly, not with the second), but he also reminds us of other objections:

• That Laeken Declaration that started things rolling: it didn’t call for any new constitution! It simply called for a convention of prominent European politicians and thinkers to get together to think up ways to improve the EU’s functioning, transparency, and degree of democracy. But this initially rather unambitious and limited aim was obviously hijacked into becoming something quite a bit more.
  
  
• Something I had forgotten: the new EU members – i.e. the ten who joined in 2004 and then the additional two in 2007 – really never had any true input on the constitutional process whose result they were later going to be asked to adhere to. That is mainly because they were not yet actual member-states when most of the content of the EU Constitution was being hammered out, generally at that constitutional convention that did get up and running. (They were only permitted to send rather powerless observers to it, whose role was to listen rather than do any talking.)
  
  So what? you may ask. Well, it should follow that, with the derailment of the EU Constitution process in the wake of the French and Dutch referenda, those new member-states should have regained the full opportunity to judge for themselves the proposed Union re-structuring as the process dragged on – yes, even to object to it if they did not like what they saw, even to dare to be the one state that refused to ratify (as in the Czech Republic) and so that would sink the process the second time around. Instead, the propaganda-line was developed that all the 25 governments making up the EU (at the time) were in favor of pushing through the proposed changes, that the only things in the way were the somewhat misguided French and Dutch electorates. And those changes were pushed through . . .
  
  
• . . . despite the “period of reflection” announced by EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso after the French and Dutch referenda defeats to give an impression of EU officials’ new chastened willingness to listen to the concerns of ordinary citizens. In actuality, that time involved rather little “reflection,” but instead fevered thinking about what new path to take to finally successfully attain the desired end-state of having those constitutional changes implemented. That path, as we know, involved relabeling the body of those changes as just a “treaty,” rather than a “constitution.” But it also involved the calculated waiting for a suitably strong and motivated EU presidency to come along to pick up the ball and get things moving again, in what turned out to be the form of the German EU presidency of the first half of 2007, which at the end of its term ensured the adoption of a “mandate” for an intergovernmental conference to meet during the next presidential term, held by Portugal, and launch the new “treaty” on its way. That duly occurred, at the routine end-of-presidency EU summit held by the Portuguese government on 13 December 2007 at Lisbon.

To summarize Petřík’s message: If you had a sneaking suspicion that the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty over the past couple of years has been subject to a bit of official EU manipulation to ensure that it succeeds, well, you really don’t know the half of it! And, although they do smack of “sour grapes” from those who tried to fight and keep the Treaty from ever being implemented at all, these arguments are still worth recalling even on the very day, today, that it does come into force. They don’t make a pretty picture.

Maybe the most that can be said in response by someone (such as this blogger) who believes that the Lisbon Treaty changes were needed for the EU to be able to function reasonably well in a challenging world, trying to blend the interests of 27 member-states, is that the US Constitutional Convention, back in 1787, also went far beyond its initial mandate, which was only to revise and improve the Articles of Confederation in effect as the law of the land in the newly-independent United States of that time. Given the more-primitive public communications means of that day, it could even be asserted as well that that Constitution was hardly ratified by the fully-informed consent of the citizens in whose name those at the Convention – and then those at the individual state ratifying conventions – claimed to be acting. What is more, that Constitution had a number of serious flaws, such as the sanction it gave to slavery and its lack of clarity over whether a state could secede, that would only be settled later by the outpouring of copious amounts of blood. (Indeed, it may even have various serious flaws today, such as the notion of the Senate filibuster – but that’s certainly a discussion for another time.) That de facto EU Constitution going into effect today no doubt has quite a few serious flaws as well – how will they be corrected?

                          

Check out that article title again (with whose translation I promise I took only very slight liberties), though: could someone kindly e-mail to me the German expression for “damn with faint praise”? Kirchgeßner’s purpose here is clearly to bend over backwards to cast the Czech presidency in the best-possible light. His piece’s very first sentence (i.e. after the lede) is “Probably no country has encountered such hostility during its EU presidency as the Czech Republic,” going on to cite all the EU and other national officials (especially the French) who cast doubt on the Czechs’ very competence to handle the assignment, and who continued to cruelly snipe at them thereafter – mostly behind-the-scenes, of course. What is more, it turned out to be a tough time to take up the job, what with the world financial crisis, Israel’s attack into Gaza, new disputes about ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, etc. – oh, and also the latest installment of the perennial Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute, which actually gave the Czechs the opportunity to mediate effectively and so chalk up an early success to their credit.

In reality, though, Kirchgeßner’s piece might just as well have been quite a bit shorter; all he really needed to do was cite the no-confidence vote of March 24 and then come full-stop. Because when you’re EU president you just don’t do that, you just don’t break up the government that for six months is more than a national government, that is in fact entrusted by the rest of the EU to provide at least a little trans-national leadership and for sure quite a lot of trans-national administrative effort and leg-work (to consult, set up meetings, establish agendas, etc.). Numerous other countries, with domestic political scenes just as fractious as the current Czech one or even more so (e.g. Italy), have taken care in the past to start preparing long beforehand to call a temporary truce to their national political conflicts to ensure that they could provide the governmental continuity for the EU presidency that is absolutely necessary – to go a good job and, basically, not to let the rest of the EU down. The Czechs could not do that, and so they should be condemned, not have excuses made for them. (And this does not even take into account the obstructive anti-EU snipings of Czech President Václav Klaus before, during, and after the de facto period of the Czech presidency.)

In essence, remember all that bad-mouthing by the French and all the rest, mentioned above, that the Czechs would not be able to handle the job? Well, they were all proved right, on March 24. And you can forget about “better luck next time,” because there probably will never be a next time: if the Lisbon Treaty is finally ratified, that will do away with the whole system of six-month national EU presidencies in favor of a one-person, elected EU President.

“But it’s easy to overlook that the Czechs are very friendly towards Europe,” Kirchgeßner writes towards the end, looking frantically for some silver lining. They punished the Social Democratic Party – widely seen as responsible for the Topolánek government’s fall – in the recent European elections; they also seem not to think much these days of their Eurosceptic president, either. OK, but what about the Slovaks or the Slovenes, whose friendliness towards the EU arguably goes much further than that of the Czechs, in that they have already taken the bitter economic medicine required to bring themselves within the eurozone? They will never have the chance to serve as EU president, nor will Poland, the most important country of that 2004 EU-entrance cohort of all. But the Czech Republic did get that chance – it’s all a function of the alphabetical-order of a country’s name, belive it or not – and messed it up royally.

                          

OK, maybe the local Czech press is overstating somewhat the general interest in what the Senate has before it (although the Czech Senate Press Office does report the presence today of seventy journalists and eleven foreign film-crews, including one even from Hong Kong.) Still, the fact remains that, three months after the lower house of the Czech parliament approved the Lisbon Treaty, today the vote is to be held to see whether the upper house does the same (which is required, of course, along with the presidential signature, for the Czech Republic formally to approve it).

You really have to wonder: why is the vote being brought up just now? You see, there’s a knotty problem for any vote, which is namely that for a foreign treaty like this to pass it needs to win at least a 3/5 vote of all Senators present and voting. But precisely when a vote is scheduled for any measure before the Czech parliament is presumably up to those heading the current government, mainly the prime minster, So we have an important clue in the fact that in a few days the current prime minister, Mirek Topolánek (having lost a vote-of-confidence in the lower house a little over a month ago) is going to have to make way for Jan Fischer, who is supposed to be a non-political technocrat but who many fear will merely be a political puppet of Czech President Václav Klaus.

I think that pretty much explains the timing, then: while Topolánek may not have considered this to be the ideal time to bring up the Lisbon Treaty in the Senate, it was at least better than anytime after he had to leave office, when there could be no assurance that it ever would be brought up at all. Of course, the outgoing prime minister was also on-hand to urge its acceptance before the Senators, as recounted in a further article from LN with an arresting title: Stop any further shame, Topolánek lobbies. “Shame”? Certainly: Topolánek’s point was how doubly-embarrassing it would be for the Czech Republic to reject the Lisbon Treaty not so long after voting out its government just as it was in the middle of the country’s first opportunity to serve as the six-month EU president. He termed that last action an “irresponsible and cynical step,” and as its main victim he would, but his main point was a good one nonetheless. A “no” vote would consign the country to the EU’s “periphery,” he claimed before the assembled Senate; what’s more, “it would threaten all lands to the east of Germany and Austria with a weakening of their ties to the West and move them into the arms of the Russians.”

While that last point is debatable, it’s still true that rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Senate would unleash a whole new set of problems for the EU (while at least rendering irrelevant – for a while, at least – the issue of when and how to hold a second referendum in Ireland about it). If the past is any guide, the immediate issue then would become how to maneuver so as to get the Senate to vote on the treaty again sometime in the future and, this time, to return the “correct” answer. While on the one hand such a process would seem to be a bit easier and less-ostentatious than repeating a whole referendum (the remedy for the previous Irish “no”), on the other hand it would still be very difficult to pull off against the Euro-sceptic resistance to be found throughout the Czech government, including most especially in the president’s office.

In any case, Topolánek’s main point is certainly valid: the Czech Republic would suffer a big blow to its European reputation. This point is reinforced by another LN piece (sourced to the Czech press agency ČTK): They say the Czech presidency could have been worse. The point of this article is, on the occasion of the last legislative session of the European Parliament in its current form (i.e. before elections coming up on June 4), to go around and ask MEPs what they think of the Czech presidency so far. The bottom-line is that no one is yet ready to provide a firm answer; the general attitude is “Let’s see them finally ratify the Lisbon Treaty, and then we’ll see what we think about them.”

Ratify it is what they’re going to do, though, at least according to Josef Kolina in his article The Czechs are fans of “Lisbon,” but they aren’t familiar with it, who cites a insta-poll carried out over the past couple of days that cites 51.2% of respondents for the Lisbon Treaty and only 29.2% against. So that means the Senate should accept it, right? is what Kolina seems to be saying, even as that poll further reveals – and it’s no big surprise – how lacking the Czech man-on-the-street is in familiarity with the changes that treaty will bring about.

Rate Yourself: Lisbon-Fan or No?

I know: that’s a rather naive attitude. But one of LN’s competitors in the market for Czech daily newspapers, Mladá fronta dnes, comes out seemingly in answer to Kolina’s concerns with a helpful and informative article, by one Zuzana Kaiserová: Fill out the quiz: Are you a fan of Lisbon, yes or no? It’s not really a “quiz” as you probably think of the word, i.e. it’s not some sort of test to see how much you know about the Lisbon Treaty, but is rather a self-evaluation questionnaire – you know, along the lines of “Are you really good in bed?” and other such articles you see all the time in women’s magazines – that is supposed to help you decide in the end whether you are “pro” or “contra.” Of course, these things can never truly be as non-partisan as their authors claim them to be; it generally does not take too much ingenuity in slanting the questions to ensure that the reader comes up most of the time with the answer that you prefer.

Looking at the questions making up this “quiz,” I’d have to think that Kaiserová is not a fan of Lisbon. Like, for example: “Does it bother you that [the Treaty] will weaken the role of the Czech Republic?” Or: “Do you want one more – European – president?” Or this: “Would it bother you if the Czech Republic no longer had Vladimír Špidla in the European Commission?” (I guess there the answer would depend on your opinion of Vladimír Špidla; he was Czech prime minister earlier in this decade, and is now European commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs & Equal Opportunities.)

UPDATE: There’s one more EU crisis avoided: the Czech Senate did pass the Lisbon Treaty.

                          

The central fact in all of this is that the Czech constitution simply does not specify who should be in charge – i.e. the president or the prime minister – when the Czech Republic has to handle the EU presidency, and of course this is the first time that country has been called upon to do so. (Considering how things are turning out, the EU might be tempted to find some way also to make it the last time, whether that’s through the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty or some other measure.) So far the going assumption was that that was the prime minister, provided that he headed a government that had the confidence of the legislature. That is no longer the case, although Topolánek is at least still around, simply because he has not yet been replaced, to try to run things even in his weakened political state.

But that will cease to be true around the end of the first week of May, Nosálková and Pospĕchová report, which is when planning calls for Fischer to be sworn in as Czech prime minister (if the required political support – meaning a vote of approval by the lower house of the legislature – is forthcoming). Handily, Fischer himself already shows clear signs of hardly being so ready to oppose President Klaus’ ambitions to take charge of EU policy at that point; as he stated to the HN reporters “It’s not yet agreed who will carry out the function of EU president. But there’s a first time for everything.”

Clearly, then, that end-of-first-week-of-May point might very well mark an important watershed between a period in which Klaus has great but not exclusive influence on Czech policy towards the EU (i.e. he still has to struggle against the politically-discredited but still-in-office Topolánek regime) and a period until the end of the Czech presidency at the end of June when he has untrammeled control. The HN reports lay out a handy scheme of the upcoming important EU events occuring in each of those periods:

During Topolánek

• Ecofin meeting (i.e. meeting of the EU member-state finance ministers)
  
• EU-Canada summit
  
• Summit to found the EU’s so-called “Eastern Partnership” with six post-Soviet states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldava, and the Ukraine. The purpose of this “partnership” is to offer support to the development of democracy and free-market economies in these countries – that is, as Nosálková and Pospĕchová rightly point out, to counteract Russian influence in them.
  
• Adjournment of the European Parliament, preliminary to the MEP elections coming up in June.
  

• EU-Russia summit (quite curious, this, coming after that previous “Eastern Partnership” founding summit)
  
• EU-China summit, to actually take place in Prague
  
• A European Council (i.e. summit of all EU heads-of-government), whose main task is supposed to be agreeing with the Irish on the date and the practicalities about having a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (you’ll recall that the Irish gave the “wrong” answer by rejecting the Treaty in a June 2008 referendum; now they are to be given another chance to give the “right” answer)
  
• Various yet-to-be-confirmed summits: EU-South Korea, EU-Pakistan, even possibly another EU-USA summit

The important list, of course, is the second one, namely of important EU events which, as things stand, look like they will be chaired and run by the Czech president, who makes no secret of his disdain for the EU. But Klaus reserves his contempt in particular for the Lisbon Treaty, which he has stated he will only sign if both houses of the Czech parliament ratify it (only the lower has done so far) and the Irish have ratified it already.

Imagine, then, next June’s important European Council meeting, charged with arranging the second Irish referendum, run by a figure who has a publicly-stated conviction against any Lisbon Treaty ratification, meaning against any second Irish referendum! Already many top EU officials can see that particular disaster coming down the road and are trying to come up with ways to avoid it. As Nosálková and Pospĕchová report, there is a plan taking shape to gut that June European Council meeting of any real significance – to make it merely naoko, or “for show” – and schedule the serious European Council for the following month, by which time Sweden will have taken over the EU presidency and serious work can resume.

Clearly they’re getting desperate with this – imagine holding that European Council in June with everybody knowing that it’s just a sham, something that has to be scheduled and run because it is on the calendar, but with at the same time a conscious attempt not to allow it to do any useful work, because of the objectionable nature of the meeting’s chairman! But that’s the solution that seems to be taking shape, if we go by this HN reporting (and I’ve also seen it mentioned elsewhere).

I think this might be the point to bring into the discussion an article/interview I came upon a few weeks ago (h/t to the new blog Poland in the EU) which advances the possibility that, somehow, Czech President Václav Klaus is actually some sort of Russian tool. As incredible as it may seem, when you think about how the 67-year-old Klaus lived most his life in a country under Soviet domination and then occupation, it is not inconceivable that at some point the Russians got ahold of some seriously embarrassing or incriminating material that enabled them to manipulate him. (See that interview for further bits of evidence that Klaus has been extremely friendly to the Russians as president.) Whatever is the case, for anyone who believes in the EU the frantic contortions it seems like it will have to put itself through to rid itself of the baleful effects of this pest are sad to see.

                          

From the very beginning of the European Union (i.e. from 1958; it was then known as the European Economic Community) the member-states have taken turns, at six-month intervals, at assuming the “EU presidency,” although the role is more-accurately described as the presidency/chairmanship of the Council of the European Union, which is the legislative forum for the member-states and usually the most-powerful of the EU’s component institutions. Naturally, the queue of countries waiting to serve their turn as president includes all EU member-states, and it was in the first half of this year that the first country from the great 10-country EU enlargement of May, 2004, had its turn as president, namely Slovenia.

The thing is, the second half of 2008 has proved to be far-from-normal times. First there was the diplomatic crisis over the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and now we have the international system of finance seriously in need of some restructuring. France is now EU President, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy has by all accounts done a credible job in responding to the worldwide financial panic. (His intervention in the Russian-Georgian conflict to secure the cease-fire was subject to rather more mixed reviews.) The comfort the EU has had with Sarkozy as point-man on that crisis may have much to do with the French president’s own personal qualities, but it also stems from France’s status as one of the EU’s major powers and its deep and capable governmental machinery. What if one or more of these grave problems had arisen during the Slovenian presidency: could President Danilo Turk and the Slovenian government have effectively handled the task of leading the EU response?

Of even more urgency is the question is “Will Václav Klaus (president), Mirek Topolánek (premier) and the rest of the Czech government be able to handle taking over the EU presidency as scheduled on January 1, 2009?” It will be the first time that country has ever had that responsibility, of course. In addition to sheer inexperience, the Czech Republic is a relatively small member-state anyway (10 million population); more serious is the fact that it does not use the euro (and probably won’t qualify to do so for at least a couple more years), so that Czech representatives routinely have found themselves not invited to the vital meetings of the Euro-zone that have take place over the past few weeks.

That is why the idea has surfaced – probably from French sources, admittedly – to keep Sarkozy and France on as EU president well into next year, until the beginning of the following year in fact, at least when it comes to financial/economic matters and, as Bos reported at his press conference, discussion about this is ongoing within EU circles. This would be quite a break from 50-year-old EU procedure, of course. As for one country handling financial/economic matters and another handling the rest, how does that work? Where is the boundary-line? Already Germany, the UK, and Luxembourg have indicated that they are not interested in any such thing, the NRC article (with no by-line) reports. The Netherlands, though, if Bos’ remarks are any indication, could find something like that acceptable – provided, however, that the continued independence of the European Central Bank from political influence is guaranteed, something that Sarkozy has tried to undermine in the past.

That any such measure would amount to something of an insult towards the Czech Republic (“Sorry guys: we don’t think you can handle the job!”) is one aspect to which none of the EU leaders who are discussing this plan seem to be devoting much thought. But all of that becomes understandable once again when you remember that the Czech president is still Václav Klaus, who is way down the list of the EU’s favorite national leaders. Long-term readers of this blog will recall that Klaus was rather alarmingly stand-offish about the EU even back just previous to the Czech Republic’s accession referendum in June, 2004. (OK, so maybe in the €S context “long-term reader” is more of a theoretical concept – well, except: Hi Mom! Anyway, if you want to check out my past treatment of Václav Klaus’ rather strained attitude towards the EU, you could start here.) He has adopted the same idea towards the Lisbon Treaty, which he plainly is opposed to: after the “No” in the June Irish referendum, he straight-out declared it to be null-and-void, which is something you’re just not supposed to say in polite EU society.

Topolánek in Danger of Toppling

But it’s not just Václav Klaus, or the fact that the Czech Republic is not in the Euro-zone that has the idea of an upcoming Czech EU presidency making people queasy. In the Czech Republic the president fulfills a mostly ceremonial role as head-of-state (similar to Germany, say, or the UK’s Queen Elizabeth) anyway, and it’s the actual functioning government of premier Mirek Topolánek that is looking shaky, according to a new analysis by Kilian Kirchgessner in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Everyone Vexes Topolánek). Regional elections held last weekend resulted in serious losses for his ODS party, and defections of ODS members of the national legislature from personal loyalty to Topolánek are increasing, to the point that there is a serious risk he will be replaced as party leader. A no-confidence motion against his government in the Czech parliament earlier this week turned out to be premature, but nonetheless Topolánek has even cancelled a visit he was supposed to make to the White House and George W. Bush next week to stay home and try to save his political skin. Maybe there was another, hidden reason for the cancellation, though – and I don’t mean Bush’s increasing lame-duck irrelevance; most friendly world leaders like to visit the White House and get that presidential photo-op no matter what. As Kirchgessner reports in his FR piece, Topolánek, having signed on 8 July the treaty to establish a US-run missile-defense radar site in the Czech Republic, may now be in danger of failing to gain the necessary ratification of that pact from the Czech parliament. Polls show that two-thirds of the Czech population disapproves of the deal; Topolánek’s ODS government went ahead and signed the treaty anyway, but a big part of the success of the opposition parties last weekend stemmed from the public’s unhappiness.

It fell earlier this year to little Slovenia to demonstrate that the EU’s new and small members could still be competent to run the Union’s affairs effectively as President of the Council, and by all accounts they did a good job. (Of course, they had few demands placed on them; and remember that Cyprus will take over the presidency in the second half of 2012! How are we feeling about that?) The Czechs, in contrast, look seriously in danger of dropping the ball for their fellow new member-states. Maybe Sarkozy would be preferable after all.

                          

Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, Serge Halimi turns up as the skunk at the EU’s garden party. As he reminds us in an article entitled Simplified Democracy, with all this push for ratification there is still the little matter that the Lisbon Treaty will institute significant changes in the way the EU is run about which most European peoples will not get the opportunity they deserve to decide – namely by referenda. Even worse: a couple of European peoples have already had the chance to decide about these changes – and have rejected them!

Halimi’s central accusation is that the Lisbon Treaty process has merely amounted to a cynical maneuver to push through the so-called European Constitution that was left for dead in 2005 after voters in the referenda in France and the Netherlands voted “no.” This is hardly an original notion; what this article rather brings to the table is the damning evidence – clear, short, and sweet.

For there is no substantial difference between the rejected Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty – this according to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who chaired the Convention that wrote the draft Constitution: “[T]he tools are exactly the same. Only the order has been changed in the tool-box.” Halimi gives chapter-and-verse on the broken promises about the Constitution that have marked the political scenes of several European lands:

• Nicolas Sarkozy, now French president, in June, 2006: “As a consistent European and a responsible politician, you can’t simply pretend after the French “no” to the European Constitution that nothing has happened! The French people have addressed a message to us: I want to pay attention to it.” But then this year, as mentioned, Sarkozy simply pushed the Lisbon Treaty through parliament.
• In the Netherlands, the people rejected the European Constitution with a vote of 62%. Nonetheless, the Lisbon Treaty is scheduled to be addressed for approval by the Dutch parliament.
• Tony Blair promised just before the European elections of 2004 that the British people would get a referendum on the European Constitution. Of course, they never got the chance on that “Constitution,” but what about the Lisbon Treaty? No, it turns out Blair’s successor Gordon Brown intends to submit the Treaty to Parliament.
• And in Portugal, the governing Socialist Party promised on the occasion of the national elections of February, 2005, that there would be a referendum on the Constitution. Now premier José Sócrates will have none of that – “the circumstances have completely changed. It’s a different treaty.”

But it’s seemingly not a different treaty to many, including those best placed to know. As Halimi points out, it’s only the Irish who will have a chance to approve or disapprove of the Lisbon Treaty with a referendum, to occur in May or June. And if they vote “no” – give the “wrong answer”? There is little doubt that the EU machinery will collectively find some way around that, too. In which case, why even bother to show up to cast one’s vote?