WHITHER EUROPE: Opinion formers chart the way forward for the EU Crucial parts of the constitutional treaty can be rescued and reforms made to ensure the better working of the EU by simple agreements between member state governments without the need for a referendum, writes Peter Sutherland.
There is no State within the European Union which has a greater interest in matters such as the constitutional treaty than Ireland. As a result it is in our vital national interest that the cohesion of the union be maintained if not enhanced. The present crisis is of vital importance to us because it threatens this cohesion.
A series of commentators, such as Dominique Moisi of the French Institute of International Relations, have suggested this crisis may presage the gradual and serious decline of the EU. This may be unduly dramatic but it is a possible scenario.
However the referenda results in France and the Netherlands were not rejections of the process of European integration.
The evidence points in other directions: fear of immigration, disenchantment with their own national politicians, the pace and effects of enlargement, even fears of globalisation and misconceptions about the treaty being an "Anglo-Saxon creation" were the main reasons.
As prime minister Blair recently said, the results evidenced "a deeper discontent with the state of affairs in Europe" but that "it is not a crisis of political institutions but a crisis of leadership".
Of course it was likely from the beginning that by calling voluntary referenda the constitutional treaty would be destroyed. To call a referendum when it was not required on a document of more than 65,000 words that was called a constitution but clearly was not one, and that was exceedingly complex, invited rejection.
The nonsense written about a document that is largely codifying in its effect, and which adds little more than efficiency and coherence to what we already have, by commentators who should have known better, has been destructive in France and Britain in particular.
In addition, in France and Holland there was no ostensible price for saying "no". Previous experience in Ireland and Denmark should have persuaded all concerned that it was reckless and, in my view, democratically unnecessary to take the course of calling a referendum when it was not required by national law and which did not create fundamental changes.
Had a referendum taken place in the United Kingdom following successful ratification elsewhere it would have been a different matter. Then the platforms of the "no" campaigners would not have been festooned with European flags as they were in France.
The debate would really have revolved around the "in or out" and the UK's membership of the EU. Unfortunately, according to Eurobarometer polls, the British people are "less attached to Europe" than anyone else.
Uniquely a minority, only 3 out of 10, apparently believe that the UK benefits from membership and a lower proportion than anywhere else think the EU "a good thing".
For many other Europeans this attitude is a very bad thing because it negatively affects Britain's role and therefore it damages the EU as a result.
One may draw consolation from the clear reality that British values line up well in political and social attitudes with the rest of Europe. This has been demonstrated among others by the Pew Institute research.
One may conjecture that the British people are still open to be persuaded on the merits of the European project and indeed it might have been hoped that the opportunity to persuade could have been afforded by a referendum there. The shock of the French failure in particular may perhaps stimulate the leadership of the member states to seriously explain and discuss the EU in a constructive manner, often notably absent in the past.
In addition to informed debate, what is needed now is constructive engagement. There are areas in which that debate can surely take place even now when the leadership in many of the major member states are in a state of flux. For one thing I cannot believe that the current budget debate is beyond resolution.
In fact the real issue for debate on the budget should not revolve around the issue of the CAP reform which was generally agreed in 2003 but rather on the increasing tendency of examining financial contributions on the basis of juste retour and the rejection of the commission's budget proposals on areas like research.
However even if only minor changes are now likely to the proposals agreed by the overwhelming majority, there must be some room for compromise.
Another example should be in respect of the constitutional treaty itself. There are important elements of the constitutional treaty which can be rescued and which can help the union to run more smoothly and which will not necessarily require a referendum even here because not all of them would need to be enshrined in a formal treaty revision.
The more efficient and transparent functioning of the council, the greater involvement of national parliaments in the legislative process, a greater role for the European Parliament in choosing the president of the Commission, even the better co-ordination of European foreign policy - there is scope for progress to be made in all these areas by simple agreement, formal or informal, between member state governments. The better working of the European Union along these lines should not be a matter of great controversy between the member states.
Turning then to the debate on the economic future of Europe, an important reason for the French "no" vote was the fact that the British government, for understandable domestic reasons, sought to present the document as "made in London". Ironically the government in London has had more success in convincing French voters of that proposition than they have had, or are ever likely to have in the United Kingdom.
But the reality is that the Anglo-Saxon theories allegedly introduced by the constitutional treaty in fact go back to the Treaty of Rome. It was Germany who rightly insisted upon them at the outset and if anything they are expressed in more uncompromising terms in the Treaty of Rome than anywhere else.
It is profoundly worrying that over the past decade Europe's political elite have done so little to explain to their citizens the true nature of the process of European integration in which open and liberalised markets play a central role but where community solidarity is also a crucial component.
After a bitter lesson we have done so here, and indeed it is a touch-stone of mature and self-confident political leadership in a democracy to help the electorate to understand unfamiliar or unwelcome truths.
How is it that "the Brussels bureaucrats" can be, at the one time, demonised as free market ayatollahs in France and sometimes in Germany and yet in the United Kingdom they are considered as interfering busybodies determined to disrupt the market?
The reality is that the common policies that have endured - and there are many of them - have generally come through the community method that has served us so well by seeking compromise and common ground rather than the bartering between capitals that usually ends in confrontation. In other words support and use the European Commission with its exclusive right of initiative rather than try to reduce it to an impotent secretariat. If national politicians do not understand how it all works it is surely time that they learned.
It is time to get the show back on the road. Perhaps this crisis can still be considered as a salutary one but only if we learn from it. We can learn above all that if there is a disconnection between the people and the European Union the main culprits are to be found at home banging a jingoistic drum.
Unless the electorates receive a clear and honest sense of direction about the necessity and desirability of what the European Union does and stands for there can be little hope of this much vaunted "reconnection" ofthe electorates to the European project. In other words politicians should seek the source of the problem nearer home.
• Peter D Sutherland is president of The Federal Trust, a London-based think tank that studies the interactions between regional, national, European and global levels of government. He is a former EU commissioner
Tomorrow: Casting the EU as a counterweight to the US is likely to fail - most Europeans do not want to have to choose between the two, writes Charles Kupchan