If you were a superstitious Europhile, you might think it a bad omen that thousands of copies of the new EU Constitution had to be pulped the other day because someone had — mischievously or otherwise — printed the words “incoherent text” alongside article 1/33 of the French version — just as it was due to be distributed as part of the campaign for a “oui” on May 29. Happily for Jacques Chirac, bounced into a high-risk vote by Tony Blair’s volte-face, there are six weeks left before this date with destiny (though he has insisted, in response to repeated suggestions by his thrusting rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, that he won’t resign if it doesn’t go his way).
But the polls show that the yes camp will be hard put to avoid a defeat and — since the treaty has to be ratified by all member states — a crisis which will be very bad news for Europe.
It’s true that the document’s 440 articles are not exactly bedside reading. Chirac’s defense in last week’s live TV debate, sniped Laurent Fabius, the former socialist prime minister, was like the constitution itself: Long and not very convincing. But it does achieve the goal of making the EU’s current Heath Robinson structures more workable for a club of 25, clarifying the division of powers between nation states and Brussels. And it should help the union to pack a bigger punch on the world stage. You can tell things are going badly not only from the French polls — showing an average 53 percent against — but also from signs of schadenfreude about salutary wake-up calls and suchlike from British skeptics, looking forward to the “delicious prospect” of humiliation for Chirac. (Such glee would be louder if we were not in the middle of an election campaign from which Europe is so conspicuously absent.)
You can tell, too, from the first glimmerings of pre-emptive, damage-limiting spin from Paris that a “non” will be a setback, not a catastrophe. Jack Straw side-stepped the issue deftly the other day but knows that whatever else happens, that would at least let Tony Blair off his referendum hook.
Everyone realizes that there is no plan B in the event of failure. Formally, the EU rulebook would revert to the much-maligned treaty of Nice, secured in a marathon haggle in 2000, but still rubbished as a recipe for paralysis. Renegotiating the constitution seems too difficult to imagine, though there is talk of keeping big reforms such as an EU foreign minister and more majority voting.
France’s vote may really be more about unemployment, dislike of Turkish EU membership or of aging, elitist politicians who have lost the plot, but it will still decide whether the new treaty lives or dies. Defeat for Chirac will push the Dutch, worried about immigration and breaches of eurozone budget rules by France and Germany, into a thumbs-down when they hold their referendum on June 1. Ditto the Danes, the Poles, etc.
For anyone who followed the tortuous gestation of the constitution from its origins in the more modest EU charter of rights (the one Keith Vaz dismissed as of no more importance than the Beano), through the Brussels convention to the final text unveiled to the strains of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, it is hard to believe that it could now be in such serious trouble.
Its principal architect, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, once said that future generations would erect statues of him and his convention colleagues on horseback, just as grateful mediaeval peasants once did to commemorate the deeds of their great leaders. Giscard, with an eye on the Founding Fathers of the US, thought his constitution would last Europe for 50 years. In these glum times, both these predictions are starting to look more than a little vainglorious.
