This State's bargaining powers will be tested as the Government sets about the difficult task of defending its clearly stated principles, writes Linda McEvoy.
The growing controversy provoked by the publication of a draft of the proposed EU constitution is more than just another round in the long-running and overly simplified europhile-versus-eurosceptic debate.
This radical proposal would replace 50 years of slowly evolving common market treaties with a single, revolutionary EU constitution. It would seal the political and democratic fate of Europe for generations to come.
The document envisages the development of a centralised EU state along the lines of the French model: a single "prime minister" to control internal matters and a single foreign minister for all foreign policy matters.
Member-states would be constitutionally required, for example, to "actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity". Such a clause presupposes a common foreign policy in the first instance. One wonders how the lesson of the deep EU divisions over Iraq, for example, can be so easily forgotten.
The partner-state grouping opposing this draft appears to include our own Government, to judge by its more important pronouncements to date.
In a key policy address delivered to the Institute of European Affairs by the Minister for Foreign Affairs on January 15th, he defined the EU as "as a partnership of sovereign member-states" and said that the treaty must produce a balanced institutional framework in which "the interests and equality" of each member-state are protected.
This concept of equality among member-states is at the very heart of the issue. The juridical equality of states has always been a cornerstone of international law, and the abandonment of that principle in the EU would be the decisive step towards a truly centralised system.
As Mr Cowen pointed out, there is no "body politic" in the Union democratically competent to elect a Commission president, let alone a federal government. What we should have for the foreseeable future are Union institutions with limited powers, acting on the basis of a system of carefully balanced but competing national interests - in effect, the partnership model.
This balance includes a weighting of votes, based on population, in many Union matters. That is quite compatible with equality of respect for each member-state in more fundamental issues. Equality and partnership are clearly symbolised, for example, in the rotation of the presidency of the inter-governmental European Council to each member-state in turn, irrespective of population. The Minister's view is that this expression of equality should continue to be a feature of the Union.
Mr Cowen also asserted that Ireland would seek to retain the national veto in shared areas such as taxation policy, justice, home affairs and aspects of foreign policy. The task of pursuing the common good of its citizens in other important areas (health, education etc) should also remain the exclusive responsibility of each member-state.
This concern for national independence is not idle. Having a sovereign responsibility for the "common good" of its citizens entitles states to deal with each other on the basis of a fundamental equality in international law. From the equality of human persons before the law comes the principle that every state, as the agent of the common good of its citizens, is entitled to equal respect.
Equality means that less powerful states cannot be arbitrarily subjugated to the needs of more powerful states, just as individual persons cannot be treated unequally as a means to further the goals of other persons.
This equality does not ignore the very real differences in the size and power of individual states, any more than personal equality ignores actual differences between human beings. The radical equality of each human person can be protected by law while recognising the real differences in capacity and function between, say, a newborn child and a grown adult.
In keeping with this vision of an inter-state partnership in the EU, the Minister also rejected the federalist ambition to use the charter of fundamental rights and accession to the European Convention on Human Rights to extend Union control over areas of national legislation.
He said that the charter of fundamental rights would only apply to the institutions of the Union and to the member-states insofar as they are implementing Union law and that it would not replace national constitutions as the proximate source of personal rights.
It is clear that the Minister has a battle on his hands in this area in particular, as the charter is now incorporated in the draft EU constitution in a manner that would ensure that it would automatically over-rule the Irish Constitution in these areas.
In this and in other important respects, the draft constitution is greatly at variance with the Irish national position as laid out by Mr Cowen last January. Ireland's bargaining powers, bolstered we hope by decades of goodwill and acquiescence, will be severely tested as the Government sets about the difficult task of defending its clearly stated principles.
Linda McEvoy is a solicitor and a spokeswoman for Equal in Europe, established last year in advance of the second Nice Treaty referendum. It favours an EU of co-operating member-states based on the principles of equality and subsidiarity and rejects the trend towards centralisation