Smug satisfaction over Irish referendum result maybe premature

By David Haworth, in Brussels

By the time you read this, Ireland’s second attempt to ratify the Lisbon Treaty may have succeeded and thunderous pieties about the nation’s wisdom, maturity and farsightedness in reaching the “right” decision will be heard in all the continent’s chancelleries.

Thus the only European Union (EU) member to hold a referendum on this agreement will have been punched to the canvas by fear (the devastating recession) and loathing (the EU institutions and other capitals).

True, the Treaty’s legislative journey is not yet over. Two more EU members have still to ratify the document, the Czech Republic and Poland.

After the Irish result, the Polish Eurosceptic President Lech Kaczynski is likely to move into line quickly and ratify the document.

Ratification by the Czech Republic is being held up by President Václav Klaus, another Eurosceptic, who has said he would not make up his mind until all other EU members have fully endorsed Lisbon.

Even if this happens the robustly cussed Czech leader has another reason to delay his signature: a group of Czech senators are planning a constitutional complaint against the Treaty and Klaus has said he will not make his ratification decision until after the Constitutional Court rules on the planned challenge.

And, oh yes, Klaus might be tempted to delay Czech ratification until after an almost imminent British general election and its almost certain return of a Conservative administration which will fulfill a promise to hold a Lisbon Treaty referendum.

In those circumstances, of course, the Treaty would be dead before it hit the ground.

January 1, 2010, is not legally prescribed as a deadline for the Treaty to come into force but it is a politically important target if the charter, seven years in preparation, is not to unravel.

We may or may not close our ears for the moment to Czech noises off, but if one wants to avoid the smirking triumphalism by the EU’s political elites occasioned by the Irish result, look away now. There will be plenty of it – and for some time.

It will be especially distasteful in Dublin where the Fianna Fail party is trussed up in complex stupidities and has been in power far too long.

So it will be the country’s thinkers, not its politicians, who will be called upon to do the spadework in working out what the next generation will be told about Ireland’s about-face in 2009.

Expediency, fear, recession, self-doubt: one can tick all the boxes. Certainly it will take a while for the mendacious sediment of the campaign to be filtered away. But, like the first Lisbon Treaty plebiscite, the campaign mixture was thickened by lies on both sides of the argument; not just over-excitement, but real, desperate whoppers.

In a decade or so when the carapace of a supranational state has settled inescapably above our heads, the sentimental Irish will have cause to lament (they’re good at that) the chance they fumbled in the cause of a more democratic European Union.

What the Irish will find is that the Rome Treaty’s “ever closer union”, now supercharged by the Lisbon accord, will give unembarrassed licence to the larger members to harry the smaller ones into agreeing what the EU’s First Division (which by then may include Turkey) decides what’s good for everybody – and to hell with more refined assessments of need and exception.