THE future of the European Union and Britain's role in it is being decided in Lisbon today and tomorrow as leaders of all 27 member states of the EU meet under Portuguese chairmanship to finalise the text of the Reform Treaty which was approved in principle at the June EU summit in Germany. I do not mean to imply that if agreement is not reached the EU will cease to exist; it will continue but in a less satisfactory form than the Reform Treaty will create. Britain's future role is at stake because once again it is asking for special treatment with opt-outs to various important provisions of the Treaty; the time cannot be far off when the other 26 members of the EU turn to Britain and ask whether it really wants to continue as a full member.
The Reform Treaty takes forward the process of building and shaping the European Union to serve the joint objectives of its members in just the same way that the Treaty of Paris (1951), the Treaties of Rome (1957) , the Single European Act (1986) , and the Treaty of Maastricht (1991) did in their time. These are the pillars on which the European Union has been built; the Reform Treaty (2007, hopefully) adds further support. The controversial provisions of the Reform Treaty, as seen by its opponents in Britain, have been thoroughly debated in the UK media and elsewhere in the past six months. To critics of its provisions on justice and home affairs and on the EU charter of rights the British government has insisted, following the meetings of Foreign Ministers earlier this week, that all the so-called red-line safeguards have been secured. Complaints about proposals for an EU foreign minister and a permanent president of the policy-making Council of Ministers have been shown to be misleading and exaggerated.
The essential point is that an organisation of 27 members cannot be run efficiently on the basis of procedures introduced when there were fewer than half that number. The Reform Treaty puts in place better ways of achieving the objectives of the EU, as determined by its member states; it also gives increased powers to the European and national parliaments. To oppose it is to tell the enlarged EU that although it should operate more efficiently it cannot have the means to achieve that end.
THE hotly-debated question of whether Britain's ratification of the Reform Treaty should be done by referendum, as the Conservatives and the right-wing press argue, or by parliamentary procedure as the Government proposes, will not feature at the Lisbon meeting, except as distracting background noise.
This debate hinges on the promise made by Tony Blair at the 2005 election to put the EU Constitution to a public vote if necessary. This Constitution, drawn up under the leadership of Valery Giscard d'Estaing, was rejected by the Dutch and French voters although it had been ratified by 17 other countries. The Reform Treaty includes some, but by no means all, of the proposals in the Constitution but its opening paragraphs contain the unqualified statement that that is not a Constitution, but a Treaty. Its opponents say that is just semantics. But I have yet to hear from these critics of the Treaty why the procedure of parliamentary approval used by Mrs Thatcher and Mr Major for the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty is not good enough for the Reform Treaty.