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?

                          

In truth, this “Barack Obama’s first foreign policy test” has been a red-hot label looking for something to which to affix itself ever since he won the election, if not even before. For one thing, remember the remarks on the campaign-trail by Joe Biden – comments apparently not particularly welcomed by the Obama campaign – about how there surely would occur some international crisis early in the new administration, one deliberately engineered to test the new president’s resolve. As Muscat points out, this “evil prophecy” was also a line White House press spokesperson Dana Perino was pushing – for obvious partisan purpose – just before the election, and it was certainly part of John McCain’s own pitch, implicitly if not explicitly. In these early-transition days, then, it would not have taken much of an unpleasant nature, happening anywhere in the world, to turn into “Obama’s first foreign challenge,” with all eyes swiveling to Chicago to see what he intended to do about it.

And the eyes all swivel to Chicago because there are ever-fewer reasons, when something like this happens, to look to what is supposed to be the official American reaction-center, namely the White House. George W. Bush moved awfully slow even to acknowledge the Mumbai massacres, Muscat maintains, as silly turkey-pardoning pictures still dominated the official White House homepage well into the course of the attacks. Bush similarly lagged far behind the “Office of the President-Elect” in finally coming up with a reaction, namely calling up the Indian premier Manmohan Singh to offer CIA aid in investigating the attackers. The overall impression to the outside world was one of Bush as, in Muscat’s phrase, a “lame chicken.” (That’s apparently a “lame duck” in German, but one that’s really, really lame.)

The silly thing is, though, that Obama is not in fact President of the United States, that he will not become that until January 20, 2009. There is really very little that he can do, even as Americans are again reminded, in Muscat’s words, of “how quickly their own land can be the target of violence,” as apparently heightened security measures were imposed on New York City’s subway system because of some terror-warning. (And here again we have the Northeast Corridor-centric view of what is supposedly happening through all 50 states that foreign correspondents like Sabine Muscat have so much trouble escaping. Were residents of Butte, Montana, say, recently reminded of this vulnerability as well – or even the denizens of LA?) He has not even formally unveiled his team of national security advisers, although the top names are pretty much known (Robert Gates remains at Defense, Hillary Clinton at the State Department, etc.). Of course, he has now presented his economic team – he completed that task last week – and the logic of giving that precedence remains clear to all in light of America’s, and the world’s, serious economic troubles.

We should have to wait no more than a day or two into this upcoming week to find out the composition of the Obama national security team, anyway. In the meantime, articles such as Muscat’s merely represent the latest outpouring of the world-wide frustration over the curious agenda prescribed by the US Constitution (as amended) that stipulates this delay of two-and-a-half months before a newly-elected president can take assume power. Gruesome incidents such as occured last week in India only serve to heighten the world-wide worry that things are falling apart just too fast, and seemingly on multiple fronts, for the US and the world to have the luxury of waiting that long for the new administration. Yes, it’s also true that the fiasco of the election of 2000 warns us against mandating a take-over by a new administration that follows too closely on the heels of the election (although many would assert that the elongated recount-and-appeal process that occurred then still did not produce the correct result, even with all the time that it was allowed).

An optimal solution – at least for 2008 – would be the one recently advanced by New York Times columnist Gail Collins: Bush should simply resign, together with Cheney, so that Nancy Pelosi would take over as head of government until Inauguration Day and so enable that federal government machinery immediately to start implementing required measures, in close coordination with the President-Elect. But not only will that not happen – if only because George W. Bush utterly lacks the humility and true love of country to ever do such a thing – but it also should not happen (and here I merely cite Collins’ reasoning), if only because of the possibility such a maneuver would open up to some misstep which would see George W. Bush gone but Dick Cheney still remaining as the American Chief Executive.