What about Core Europe?

 

Should we be jubilant about the “Reform Treaty”? The answer is no. The old Constitution, as the Irish premier Bertie Ahern has rightly noted, was better. It was clearer, more elegant, more readable. Most of the changes in the Reform Treaty are for the worse – the extension of the old voting rules by another five years, the opt-outs for the UK. So this treaty is clearly not as good, but it is better than the Nice Treaty, and therefore to be welcomed. If the EU had not agreed on it, it would have sent out a disturbing signal that the EU is mired in gridlock.

So far so good. But the treaty has also cemented the EU's internal divisons. The Polish prime ministers' latest anti-German outbursts are clear evidence that all is not well in the EU. Nicolas Sarkozy's jihad against the free market may rob the EU of one of its most important rationales if he is successful. When he will make his stance on economic policy co-ordination, I would expect tensions to arise within the euro area as a result.

The UK, meanwhile, is opting out of some of the most important areas of political integration: Schengen, the euro, justice and home affairs, parts of foreign policy, the Charter of Fundamental Rights. In due course, all this will become more important than the rapidly declining relative proportion of the policy areas we still have all in common: the customs union, the external trade policy, the single market, environment policy.

The Treaty marks and masks the growing division of Europe. Core Europe has always been an inevitability, the only question was how it would come about. The Treaty has given us the answer. Core Europe will not come about as a result of an avant-garde group of nations breaking away and forming their own integrationist counter-institutions. Core Europe now comes about totally naturally by Treaty – through an ever growing number of opts-outs, which one may also describe as opt-ins, and through greatly facilitated arrangements for enhanced co-operation, the perfectly legal way for groups of countries to integrate among each other – with the help and co-operation of the existing EU institutions.

This emergence of the new core – or of overlapping cores – may also open up new ways for future EU enlargement, especially if the French are to dig in over Turkey (which I expect they will). While Sarkozy is hell-bent to veto Turkish EU accession, and the Turks are just as determined to reject any notion of a privileged partnership, the compromise could be for Turkey to become an “official” but not “full” member in the same sense that this applies to the UK at the moment. I will expand on this thought in a future entry.

In the meantime, it is fair to say that the EU has now institutionalised division. This is truly a new development – that was not included in the old Constitutional Treaty, and one that is not going to be without consequence.

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