By Tony Barber in Brussels
Published: December 13 2007 12:35 | Last updated: December 13 2007 15:54
European Union leaders on Thursday signed a treaty designed to strengthen the bloc’s institutions and put behind them the worst crisis in the 50-year history of European integration.
The leaders of all 27 EU member-states except Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, put their names to the treaty at a ceremony in Lisbon’s Jerónimos monastery.
Mr Brown, who was attending a parliamentary hearing in London, flew to Lisbon later and signed the treaty on his own. His absence from the main signing ceremony however prompted charges from the opposition Conservative party that the prime minister’s ”gutlessness” was turning the event into a ”national embarrassment”.
William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, said: ”What will other EU leaders think of a prime minister who dithers for a week about whether he dares be photographed putting pen to paper?”
On Friday the leaders will gather in Brussels for a summit at which Mr Brown will secure support from his colleagues for a declaration that emphasises the EU’s commitment to competitiveness and an open economy in the age of globalisation.
France will win support for the creation of a “reflection group” of prominent experts, including politicians and businessmen, who will analyse what the EU should look like and should be doing by 2020-30.
A sense of relief has been palpable in all EU capitals since national leaders agreed the text of the Lisbon treaty at an October summit in the Portuguese capital.
All are keen to refocus the EU’s energies away from obscure debates over institutional reform and towards challenges that matter to European citizens such as jobs, economic growth, globalisation, security against crime and terrorism, immigration and climate change.
The EU was thrown into turmoil in 2005 when France and the Netherlands held referendums to approve a constitutional treaty that was the Lisbon treaty’s predecessor and the voters said ‘No’.
The Dutch and French rejections appeared to highlight everything that critics said was wrong with the EU at the time – an inflexible, over-bureaucratised organisation full of arrogant ambitions and convinced that it knew better than the bloc’s 495m people what was good for them.
EU leaders reacted by dropping the concept of a “constitution” from their treaty but keeping as much of the document’s detail as possible.
Most of the key changes to the EU’s institutions – the European Council, representing national governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament – remain in place in the new Lisbon treaty.
Like its forerunner, the treaty extends the use of qualified majority voting, notably in matters affecting justice and interior affairs. It keeps the new voting rules designed to smooth the EU decision-making process now that there are 27 member-states, up from 15 as in 2004.
The Lisbon treaty is an immensely complicated document with (in its English version) 175 pages of treaty text, 86 pages of protocols, a 25-page annexe and a 26-page final act containing 65 separate declarations.
Opt-outs, concessions and special provisions are scattered through the treaty, the most important of which allow the UK to keep its distance from anything smacking of far-reaching European integration.
As a result, the Lisbon treaty is a far cry from the US-style constitution that some strongly pro-integrationist European policymakers had in mind, when the project of setting down the EU’s values and procedures in a legally binding document was first aired in 2001.
The treaty still requires ratification from all member-states in order to come into effect in January 2009, but only the Irish Republic is constitutionally obliged to hold a referendum.
In other countries, parliaments will approve the treaty. In the UK, however, Mr Brown is under domestic pressure to allow a referendum – as Tony Blair, his predecessor, promised with the now defunct constitutional treaty.
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