euro|topics - Will the reform treaty help the EU?

05/07/2009

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Main focus of Thursday, October 11, 2007

Will the reform treaty help the EU?

The legal experts of the EU's 27 member states have drawn up a new version of the EU reform treaty which is to be adopted at the EU summit taking place on October 18-19 in Lisbon. However several contentious issues have been left open. Some countries are threatening to block the treaty, while referendums in others could delay its ratification. But even if the treaty is adopted, will it really facilitate cooperation within the EU?

La Vie - France

For Jean-Pierre Denis, the mini-treaty does not simplify relations within the EU: "The Union is in the grip of a terrible stranglehold, seized by an evermore irresolvable contradiction: constrained by the public to offer surface simplifications, it can only apply them through complication and fussy, sometimes downright twisted legal quarrying. But the after effect of well-meaning and obscure technical-political measures is always a tendency towards scepticism. This perverse spiral is working more than ever. In its form as much as in its contents, the simplified treaty will be terribly complicated, much more incomprehensible even than the Constitution project." (11/10/2007)

Open Democracy - United Kingdom

Political analysts Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Simone Bunse find the new treaty's propositions for EU presidency confusing: "The new arrangement hardly brings the EU closer to its citizens. The rotating council presidency at the level of the ministers will now either be invisible except by bureaucrats, or on the contrary, national presidencies will continue to be proclaimed in order to boosts governments' prestige and agendas. So we will have: the EU council president, the rotating council presidency, the high representative for foreign policy as the vice-president of the commission (itself with its president), alongside of course the European parliament's president. It is by no means clear who will represent the EU under this new arrangement. Maybe this is par for the course in a multi-centred union, but it would be nice if such multi-centredness could be expressed more clearly." (10/10/2007)

Der Standard - Austria

"The French head of state is casting himself in the role of 'trouble shooter', as he did at the last EU summit, and trying to break down the institutional blockade which has gone on for years in the EU," Stefan Brändle writes on Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to mediate between Lech Kaczynski and the EU. "French diplomacy could be tempted to adopt a halfway position between London - which like Warsaw has refused to sign the fundamental and civil rights charter - and Berlin. Paris is fond of the idea of maintaining the German-French axis, but has also recently increased its efforts to collect points in Eastern Europe and Poland." (11/10/2007)

Berlingske Tidende - Denmark

According to a recent Gallup poll, more than 50 percent of Danes want a referendum on the new EU treaty. The newspaper doesn't think this is a good idea. "Referendums can be an important and necessary element in a lively democracy. ... But it doesn't make sense to hold a referendum on a treaty aimed at increasing the EU's possibilities for making sound decisions for the benefit of Europe's citizens. It will be difficult to win support among citizens for a referendum on a primarily technical document. The referendum would be more about other things - about the pros and cons of certain areas of EU cooperation, about upcoming accessions or about the fact that the EU is perceived as being too obscure." (11/10/2007)

» To the complete press review of Thursday, October 11, 2007

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