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Blair: No Referendum
Here's the downside to Tony Blair's declaration that a new Europe doesn't need a Constitution on the scale of the document rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005: There will be a slimmed-down treaty, but Britons will not be offered a vote on it.
Speaking in the FT, the Prime Minister said that any new treaty would merely update existing agreements, and would not have the characteristics of a constitution.
The slimmed-down treaty would include new voting rules (including qualified majority voting in some areas), a new EU presidency and foreign minister, a smaller European Commission and give more powers to national governments.
This, he said, is in contrast to the rejected treaty, which "aimed to re-establish the EU and contained trappings of statehood, such as a flag and anthem".
"If it’s not a constitutional treaty, so that it alters the basic relationship between Europe and the member states, then there isn’t the same case for a referendum.”
Blair added that Britain had no tradition of referenda for such revisions to existing treaties.
In 2004, Blair was accused of bowing to Eurosceptic pressure by announcing that the Constitutional Treaty drawn up by Valery Giscard d'Estaing would be put to a referendum. Much of the media coverage of the treaty negotiations had been hostile and polls showed that Britons were hostile to the idea of the EU taking on more elements of statehood. It seemed that Blair was unlikely to win a public vote. However, France and then Holland's rejection of the treaty was privately welcomed in London, and Blair's team gratefully kicked the ball into the long grass.
Other EU nations who had approved the Constitution weren't happy to let the document rot and as Germany under pro-Constitution Chancellor Angela Merkel assumed the EU's rotating presidency in January, Blair came to see that the game was up. Merkel is determined to revive the treaty, though it is reported she is favourable to the slimmed-down version backed by Blair.
Blair saved some time thanks to the French elections. Of the two frontrunners, Nicolas Sarkozy favours a slimmed-down treaty passed through parliaments rather than referenda; Ségolène Royal has demanded that a special "social chapter" be added to the Constitution to appease France's left, and then calling another referendum.
With the election running so close for so long, even Frau Merkel's secret negotiations on the Constitution cannot have been working on a single plan for the treaty.
Sensing that the revival of the Constitution was inevitable, Blair resigned himself to completing a deal in the dying days of his premiership. In his FT interview, he returned to his vow, made ten years before, to end years of disagreements and place Britain "at the heart of Europe."
It's a neat rounding off to his ten years as PM, or so he hopes. While Blair's early days as PM were cosy enough, with fellow centre-leftists Lionel Jospin as France's PM and Gerhard Schröder as Germany's Chancellor, the Iraq war drove a wedge between Britain and its largest EU "partners."
Then, the Constitution vote, which France's President Jaques Chirac claimed forced him into calling a referendum in France. Several years of intense disagreement followed over agriculture subsidies and Britain's "rebate" - at one stage, a government leader said relations between EU nations had never been so low, even during Margaret Thatcher's pomp.
Of course, when he became Prime Minister in 1997 Blair did not expect a Constitution of the type France rejected to be written: What moderate British Europhiles see as a positive relationship with Europe is not always in step with the visions of Eurofederalists, who dream up most of the integrating schemes.
It was in retrospect wrong to expect Blair's conciliatory Europhilia to be matched in Brussels by a reciprocal cooling down of federalist ferment. Britain is only one country and bringing Britain on board has never been the major aim of the EU's most determined federalists.
Blair said he does not expect his probable successor Gordon Brown to unpick any agreement reached on the new treaty. Britain's decision, he says, will be one reached by the government as a whole.
Blair added the Chancellor is pro-Europe, but also pro-reform of Europe.
