THE LISBON Treaty would make for better regulation of the European Union in these days of economic difficulty, author and commentator Timothy Garton Ash has said.
In a lecture on The Europe We Need, delivered at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin yesterday, he said: “We are launched on big and stormy seas. We need a bigger and better boat, and there are also still some monsters in the deep.”
The EU was that boat, but he warned against exaggerating the scope of the Lisbon Treaty: “The mountain has laboured and produced a mouse.”
He continued: “But we need it, particularly if you consider that getting our act together is one of the most important tasks for the EU in the next 10 years.”
The last decade had been wasted in a “sterile debate”, he added. “We cannot afford to waste any more time.”
When the treaty was finally ratified, “then we can at last put this decade behind us and start with the 2010s”.
He said the “key appointment” under the Lisbon Treaty would be to the position of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (merging the current positions of High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and European Commissioner for External Relations).
This would have to go to “a really notable political figure”. The development of a real European foreign policy would require “a strategic coalition of member states”.
But Prof Garton Ash said he was “not very optimistic” that such a coalition would be formed and he stressed the role of Ireland and similar-sized member states in promoting such a project.
Referring to what he called “the British problem”, he said the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, would probably form the next government in London.
But the Tories were joining the new European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, which included the Latvian National Independence Movement/For Fatherland and Freedom party, whom critics regard as being on the far right.
“Cameron’s Latvian Legion,” Prof Garton Ash said, “reduces me to despair.”
He said one of Tony Blair’s greatest failings as prime minister – apart from the Iraq War – was his “failure to end Britain’s historic ambivalence about the European project”.
However he had no doubt that, after five years had elapsed, a Cameron-led government would have taken up a “more realistic” position on the EU.
Turning to what he called “the German problem”, he said the Federal Republic was for many years the motor of EU integration.
He regretted to observe “with concern” that Germany was now becoming a “normal” member state, ie it was “simply pursuing its own short-term national interests”.
“That is why we really do need states like Ireland to step in where maybe the bigger states are hesitating,” he said.
The full lecture is due to be available on video at the institute’s website at www.iiea.com
