This final week of campaigning on the European Union's constitutional treaty in France is expected to see intensified debate about its merits there and elsewhere in the EU. Politically, its fate depends to a great extent on the French vote and on the subsequent one in the Netherlands should either electorate vote No even if other states press on with their referendums.
A significant and interesting feature of the French campaign in its closing stages has been the direct involvement of political leaders from other EU member-states. This is an EU-wide issue. The constitutional treaty, if ratified, will have a direct bearing on how some 430 million people are governed. Yet the ratification referendums, as happened here on the Nice Treaty, fall prey to national issues. President Chirac observes that the French electorate may answer questions it is not asked, taking its revenge on an unpopular government. The question then becomes whether it is fair or valid to blame European policies for his domestic unpopularity.
It is certainly a strength of the French campaign against the treaty that it has sought to make such connections between French unemployment, economic weakness or deteriorating social conditions and the values enshrined in the EU constitution. And if that is so, it is plausible for politicians and activists from other states to intervene in the French argument. Thus, the former Labour Party leader, Ruairí Quinn, has advised French Socialist Party leaders and voters to go along with the advice he gave Irish voters in the Nice Treaty campaign - "Fianna Fáil can wait; Europe can't". And the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder asked the French voters "not to leave other Europeans in the lurch".
Most vigorously, the leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, has been campaigning throughout France in support of the constitution, aiming his attacks especially at left-wing supporters of the No camp - so much so that they have taken to picketing his appearances in frustration. He ridicules French Greens and Socialists who oppose a stronger military role for the EU, saying this will in fact increase US control over European affairs through NATO. And in an interview with this newspaper, he turned these criticisms on similar arguments made by the Green Party in Ireland in their debates on whether or not to support the constitution. His remarks are welcome for encouraging genuine transnational debate and argument. Without that, politics will atrophy into national shells and will not address these issues arising from greater interdependence satisfactorily.