NEW RUMOURS OF A TWO-TIER, TWO-CLASS EU?

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday March 12, 2003 21:40 by Anthony Coughlan jcoughln at tcd dot ie

NEW RUMOURS OF A TWO-TIER, TWO-CLASS EU?

NEW RUMOURS OF A TWO-TIER, TWO-CLASS EU? For your information from Anthony Coughlan, TCD . . . Wednesday 12 March 2003

The excerpt below from the main front-page story in today's London
"Guardian" is interesting. We are likely to hear more about what it
refers
to before long.

It has seemed unlikely for some time that the EU Convention on the
Future
of Europe which is currently meeting in Brussels would be capable of
producing an EU Constitution or Constitutional Treaty that would be
acceptable to an enlarged EU of 24/25 States.

This is why France-Germany and some others want the next EU treaty to
be
signed BEFORE any of the 10 EU applicant countries can join the EU.
The
latter can then be presented with the "fait accompli" of an EU
Federalist
State Constitution, on top of what they are having to sign up to in the
4000 pages of their Accession Treaties.

In view of the more than 1000 amendments that have been proposed to the
first 16 article of Giscard d'Estaing's draft EU Constitution, it looks
now
as if agreement may be be impossible even for an EU of 15. In that
case
the French-German axis will surely fall back on the project of a
two-tier,
two-speed, two-class EU, the legal door to which was opened by the
"enhanced cooperation" provisions of the Treaty of Nice - which the
No-side in Ireland's Nice referendums warned about.

This would be quite in line with the pretensions of French President
Chirac, when he told the East Europeans who issued a statement backing
American policy on Iraq three weeks ago, that they were "childish" and
had
lost a good opportunity to shut up! Chirac has hinted that he might
put
the EU Accession Treaty to referendum in France before ratifying it.

Irrespective of one's views on the Iraq crisis, such arrogance shows
how
France-Germany really regard the Small State members of the EU, and in
particular the expected newcomers.

_________

Excerpt from main front-page article in "The Guardian", London, on
today,
Wednesday 12 March
_________

'Germany's Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is due in London today for a
dinner with Mr Blair, at which the atmosphere is likely to be
distinctly
strained.

Apart from the two leaders' sharply contrasting stances on Iraq, they
will
be meeting against a background of renewed speculation on the emergence
of
a "two tier" Europe that could leave Britain and other Iraq hawks such
as
Spain and Portugal out in the cold.

For the Blair government, which had vowed to put Britain "at the heart
of
Eyrpe", the idea is worryingly reminiscent of a proposal made by the
German
foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, in May 2000 calling for an
"avant-garde"
of states willing to move faster towards unity.

The suggestion was picked up two months later by Jacques Chirac in a
speech
to the German parliament, but then lost momentum.'