Quotes of the Day

Throughout the European Union, the E.U. Reform Treaty (a.k.a. the Treaty of Lisbon) is trundling toward ratification by each of the 27 member states. In the U.K., for example, the ratifying legislation has, with much acrimony, recently completed its passage through the House of Commons, and it will soon start its passage through the House of Lords. So, it is a good time to take a hard look at the nature of the treaty, and indeed to ask the question of what the E.U. is really all about.

The new treaty is, of course, secondhand goods. Some three years ago, with much fanfare, the European Union Constitutional Treaty was launched, only to bite the dust when the French and Dutch rejected it in national referendums. This is its second coming. Although the form is different, experts are divided only as to whether 95% of the content is the same, or merely 90%. Since all the most important constitutional innovations of the earlier treaty have been carried forward to the present one, that is neither here nor there.

The treaty was originally presented as a necessity, enabling an enlarged E.U. to function following the accession of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In fact, since the Franco-Dutch rejection of the treaty, the E.U. has been functioning as well as it ever has done. But, of course, that was never the real purpose of the treaty. Nor was the true purpose to provide the E.U. with a proper constitution — an objective I warmly support. To understand what the treaty is all about, it is necessary to understand what the E.U. itself is all about.

We can readily dismiss those who believe the E.U. is, or should be, about economics. The relevant economic context is not European but global, and the responsibility for pursuing economic policies that will enable business and industry to prosper in a globalized world economy is national. No, the purpose of the E.U., right from the start, even when it called itself the European Economic Community, has always been political.

Originally, that purpose was to preserve the peace by placing Germany firmly within a wider European structure to eliminate the risk of what might be termed German recidivism. That objective has been fully achieved. Since then, the further political purpose arose of helping the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, newly emancipated from the Soviet empire, to make the transition to freedom, capitalism and security by embedding them in that same European structure. That, too, has been largely achieved — with their security further buttressed by membership of NATO.

Looking ahead, there is arguably a further political purpose: to build a bridge to the Islamic world by the accession of Turkey. But although this is a formally agreed E.U. objective, most E.U. leaders, not to mention their peoples, hope and believe this will never happen.

Meanwhile, there is another, quite different view of what the E.U. is about politically — and it is this alone that explains the present treaty. In a recently published essay, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote: "In Europe the nation-state is in the process of being diminished. The European Union is supposed to replace it, but the reality is that Europe is in transition between a past that it has rejected and a future which it has not yet reached."

It is the furtherance of this transition that the reform treaty is all about. Hence the notorious "passerelle" clauses, which enable matters now within the competence of individual member states to become an E.U. competence, and matters that now require unanimity to be decided by majority voting, without the current requirement of formal treaty amendment or the approval of national parliaments.

I believe that both Kissinger and the framers of the treaty are profoundly mistaken. The E.U. is not in some period of transition toward a full-blown United States of Europe, if only because the great majority of Europeans neither want it nor would feel any sense of allegiance to it. This is as true of France as of Britain. I was living in France during the 2005 referendum campaign, and it was clear that the treaty was rejected largely because the French were fed up with change after change being imposed on them in the name of Europe. What they wanted was stability: to know where they stood, and to remain first and foremost French.

A stable framework would be the purpose of a genuine constitution. It would set out clearly those matters that are the responsibility of the E.U., and those that remain the responsibility of the member states. It is this that Europe badly needs. And it can be secured if, and only if, the federalist dream is explicitly abandoned. Meanwhile, what we have before us is not, alas, a constitution, but its very antithesis: an anticonstitution.

Lord Lawson was Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher

• NIGEL LAWSON
• The federalist vision that underlies E.U. reform is woefully out of tune with what most Europeans want