By Jim McConalogue of The European Journal
There is not time here to spell out the post-war history of European integration, when the key continental European powers, namely France and Germany, underwent a complex process of reconstructing and containing a defeated but still dangerous Europe.
The key response of Europe’s political elites to the major external global pressures – at that time, the USA and USSR – and to its own internal economic and political failures was to push for a collective and federal organisation of European states.
In fact, from the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community through to the ratification of each European Treaty – from Rome to Nice – Europe’s political classes often within France and Germany have been frank about their creation of institutions which would lead to a “federation of Europe”. That has been their intention from the start and so the creation of a federalist state, which would exert control over national Parliaments, has long been known.
Of course, one of the most recent endeavours of the European elites has been to create a European Constitution, to enhance, consolidate and solidify a federal European superstate. When France and the Netherlands rejected the EU Constitution in their 2005 referendums, a response by the now highly-organised European Union was to ensure it still was still enforced as a constitutional text – but through a merger of the European Treaties, rather than an establishment of one text. The effect, all EU leaders have now accepted, is the same.
So, Europe must now face up to the Lisbon treaty – or rather, Ireland must face Lisbon, since she is the only country with so great a Constitution that her people have been given a say. Of course, that Constitution is already under attack since Ireland has already voted on this same treaty, and there are no new legal guarantees. The future of Europe really does sit in Ireland’s hands. The Preamble to Lisbon indicates a massive change in Ireland’s constitutional character in its relationship with the EU. It is a direct threat to Irish sovereignty. The reference in the Lisbon Treaty in which “‘this Treaty’ shall be replaced by ‘of this Treaty and of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,’ indicates a merger of two significant Treaties – those of the European Community and the European Union. The fundamental change in the Treaty provisions, resulting from the merger of the Treaty of Rome, which was about trade and political co-operation, and the Maastricht Treaty which was about European Government will alter the structure of the legal and constitutional relationship between the European Union and the Community, between Ireland and the EU and between government and the Irish Parliament and its electors. They are the conditions which represent a great threat to the way in which Ireland is governed.
I have written an assessment, ‘100 Reasons to Vote ‘No’ to the Lisbon Treaty’, because I feel so strongly against the European Commission thrusting this second referendum upon the Irish people who already rejected the Lisbon treaty – the most undemocratic text which will alter Ireland’s constitutional rights and Europe’s future political structure irreversibly.
Make no mistake, the Oireachtas will be a sitting duck in a thriving Europe, with a powerless President, the Dáil Éireann reduced to an intellectual chatting shop and the Seanad Éireann a gaggle of mere councillors within a European province, whose powers and functions detailed within the hard-fought for Constitution of Ireland, enacted by the People on 1st July 1937, will have been voluntarily handed over to a European superstate by the Irish people.
Ireland is being asked to vote on whether it wishes to belong to this European federal state. Director of the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre, Professor Anthony Coughlan, has already stated very clearly in the Irish Times, with a solid constitutional grounding, why this treaty must be necessarily considered as altering Ireland’s status within the European federal state.
Under Lisbon, the characteristics of this new European statehood will develop as follows:
1. Lisbon would give the European Union full legal personality, superior to the power of its Member States, so that it could act as a state in the global community. It would sign Treaties with other states in all areas of its powers. It would have its own political President and Foreign Minister and produce over 75% of Ireland's laws.
2. Lisbon would effectively abolish the European Community, as the common market organisation which Ireland opted to join in 1973, and replace it with the new European Union (as specified under Article 1 TEU).
3. Lisbon would give the new Union a fully developed constitutional structure so that all areas of government fall within its remit.
4. Lisbon would make the Irish people real EU citizens in this new European Union, rather than Irish citizens with EU obligations, as at present. However, there can be no European demos, nor could the Irish people have loyalty to it, or identify with the creation of a European-wide demos. It is what makes Ireland a free, democratic state and to have given it up is to give up its essential feature of Irish national democracy.
The only real difference between Ireland and the other Member States is that Ireland’s great Constitution allows her people to have a say. Bearing in mind the principles the Irish people are reaffirming in this treaty – in moving from a democratic association of European nation-states to the joining of a European federal superstate – the choice in this referendum to a European outsider, with no opportunity for a vote, is obvious.
