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JOHN COGILL for TIME
HARD SELL: Both the "no" and "yes" camps in Ireland's referendum are claiming that victory is essential to the economy
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| Uncharted Territory |
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An Irish repudiation of E.U. enlargement will leave the Union facing an unprecedented political crisis — and officials don't know how, or if, they will be able to resolve it
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By JAMES GRAFF/Brussels |
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Posted Sunday, Oct.13, 2002; 16.04 BST
If Irish voters say no to E.U. enlargement by rejecting the Nice Treaty for a second time this week, that's the end of the story — right? Since the treaty is necessary for enlargement and has to be ratified by all 15 member states, the people will have spoken and the process will be irreparably smashed. Not so fast. In Brussels, no verdict is ever final. Granted, E.U. officials insist that they'll have no recourse in the face of an Irish no vote.
"There is no Plan B," says David O'Sullivan, the Secretary-General of the European Commission. "Not because we are trying to hide something or aren't clever enough to devise one, but because a no vote will create a political crisis with consequences that we can't foresee." Nevertheless, legal detours around an Irish no are the subject of hot debate. One idea is to delicately extract just those parts of the Nice Treaty vital for enlargement — say, each newcomer's voting strength in the Parliament, the Commission and the Council — and put them into the accession treaties with new member states. Current E.U. member states, including Ireland, could ratify those treaties in national parliaments, not by unpredictable referendums.
Less attractive is what might be called the quick-and-dirty option. A provision in the existing treaty says that reforms have to be in place before E.U. membership exceeds 20 states. In principle, that means the top five candidates — as measured by their progress toward adopting E.U. laws and practices — could join without ratification of Nice. But the rancor such a maneuver would unleash among those left behind would be immense — and fully justified.
New members would welcome any lawyerly finessing that allows them to finally get in. But such an approach would just confirm the widely held view that Brussels disdains the expressed will of the people. So it's not that there's no Plan B; there's just no good Plan B. When Günter Verheugen, the commissioner responsible for enlargement, says that in the face of a no vote, "I don't know how — or whether — we can proceed," he isn't being a tricky bureaucrat. He really doesn't know whether no means no.
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