THE CER GUIDE TO THE REFORM TREATY By Hugo Brady and Katinka Barysch ★ An agreement on the new Reform (or Lisbon) Treaty looks likely at the EU summit this week. However, with an election imminent at home, the Polish government could be tempted to dig in its heels over a proposed new voting system. ★ The aim of the treaty is to make the enlarged EU work better. It does so by establishing simpler, clearer rules for decision-making; streamlining the EU’s foreign policy machinery; and giving EU institutions a greater role in police and justice co-operation. ★ Although the new treaty does not give the Union significant new powers, some member countries have been mulling a popular vote on it. France and the Netherlands have decided that parliamentary ratification is adequate. The UK will probably follow, given that it has secured wide-ranging opt-outs. ★ If ratified, the new treaty should be in force in 2009, before the next European Commission and Parliament come in. The difficulty of agreeing a treaty among 27 countries will dissuade EU governments from carrying out a similar exercise any time soon.
European leaders will meet in Lisbon on October 18th-19th, to reach final agreement on the EU’s new treaty. The Portuguese, who currently hold the EU’s rotating presidency, hope that the document will be called the ‘Treaty of Lisbon’, in line with the tradition of naming treaties after the cities in which they were agreed. Other European governments will prefer to stick with the ‘Reform Treaty’, to signal that it is less ambitious than the constitutional treaty, rejected in the French and Dutch referendums of 2005. Like the treaties of Amsterdam (1997) and Nice (2000), the new treaty will amend the EU’s founding charters. Since its changes are presented as amendments to existing texts, the new treaty is very hard to read. The constitutional treaty would have consolidated all existing treaties into one document, which would have made the Union’s legal basis much more accessible. However, in the consolidated constitutional treaty, it was hard for people to distinguish old provisions from new ones. Therefore, long-standing EU principles, such as the supremacy of EU law or the free movement of workers, suddenly became controversial. Many people also disliked those bits that made the treaty look like a national constitution: its grandiose preamble, the clauses on an EU flag and anthem (both of which were officially adopted in the 1980s), and the inclusion of a charter of fundamental rights and freedoms. The Reform Treaty abandons most of these constitutional trappings. It does preserve the parts on human rights, which most Europeans support. Most of the other clauses that have been kept are designed to improve the EU’s internal functioning; the way it implements foreign policy decisions; and its efforts to fight crime, terrorism and illegal immigration. So the treaty should make the EU more effective in key areas – without fundamentally altering the balance of power between the member-states and its institutions, namely the European Commission, Parliament and Court of Justice (ECJ).
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