It’s going to be tougher to get this Treaty passed in a Referendum than the “Yes” campaign thought and tougher for the "No" to get a claer reason to vote no.
The Irish Times poll of 5th November showing 24% in favour of the Reform Treaty, as opposed to the 46% that backed the EU Constitution, in retrospect should be no surprise. It’s easier, when asked the question – are you in favour of the EU Constitution to say yes, than when asked in you’re in favour of an EU Reform Treaty – which sounds altogether more technical, abstract (all of which is most definitely true). It also appears to be a slight misnomer…people expect Treaties to be one-off occurrences – Amsterdam, Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement etc, the notion of a Treaty reforming what is already there seems a big paradoxical.
The differences and divergences between Member States is supposed to be one of the driving forces of the EU. However the fact that the EU Constitution would probably have passed with a strong enough Yes campaign in Ireland (in my opinion), while the whole idea of an EU constitution would kill the document in the U.K. (so much so that Tony Blair was forced to concede to a referendum on the Constitution during the last election) while the Netherlands voted against the text (I think France probably voted against it predominantly for domestic reasons) shows that the people of the E.U. have hugely divergent views of the European Union and what it should and has to do.
The Yes campaign will have to be even stronger in favour of this Treaty as teh argument - "vote for europe" is unlikely to succeed as well this time as the argument was overused in Nice2. The No campaign will not be able to point to one article or another to justify their arguments as each it refers to myriad other articles and paragraphs, their agruments will doubtless be derided as baseless when their opposition entreat the public to look to "the treaties as a whole".
I haven’t been able find a copy of the Reform Treaty as between the legalese it appears no compounded version has been made up yet, but if you would like to torture yourself trying to understand it, below is a draft of it incorporating most of the text. It’s bitty and jumpy and impossible to understand as opposed to the EU constitution which was unified and therefore much simpler to understand.
I will return to the positives and drawbacks of the Treaty from my perspective (which has been sparked by reading a very good article in the 26th October to 8th November edition of “Business & Finance” magazine.
| draft_reform_treaty_lisbon.pdf |
| File Size: | 1517 kb |
| File Type: | pdf |
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