By DPA
Brussels : For an organisation that prides itself on never interfering in member states’ internal politics, the European Union has spent a lot of time of late worrying about a Polish election.
“It’s all down to (Polish Prime Minister) Jaroslaw Kaczynski. If he thinks he’ll win votes by blocking the Reform Treaty in Lisbon, he will,” a Brussels-based diplomat told DPA.
On Oct 18, the EU’s political leaders are set to hold informal talks in Lisbon. At the top of the agenda is a draft law establishing a new set of rules for the 27-member European Union.
EU leaders agreed the draft’s political details after marathon talks in June, and their approval should, therefore, be a formality.
But on Sep 7, the Polish parliament called a snap election scheduled for Oct 21, only three days after the Lisbon meeting.
The news caused consternation in Brussels. Some EU officials expressed the fear that the notoriously Eurosceptic Polish government might veto the talks in a last-minute attempt to woo voters at home.
The timing “could have been better”, the diplomat admitted dryly.
On Friday that fear seemed to be on the wane, with several member states saying they were “cautiously optimistic” that the Poles would not block the acceptance of the draft treaty.
The disquiet over the timing of the Polish election caused in Brussels nevertheless highlights the massive problem the EU faces if it is to make the treaty a reality.
According to its 50th-birthday statement, the Berlin Declaration, the EU is “expressed through the democratic interaction of the Member States and the European institutions”.
In other words, the management of the EU is a permanent balancing act between the central institutions in Brussels and the governments of individual member states.
And while that means that in theory no member state needs to feel threatened by its EU membership, in practice it has all too often led to individual governments blocking EU-wide developments because they have calculated that acceptance would cost them too much at home.
“It’s not just Poland – lots of member states have blocked the EU over hot domestic issues, or at least threatened to do it,” a highly placed official at the Council of EU member states pointed out.
Indeed, one of the complaints most commonly heard in Brussels is that national governments too often seek to score domestic political points by blaming unpopular measures on the EU.
But the EU’s collegiate structure leaves national governments themselves in a painful dilemma. If they too often obstruct EU-wide projects, they can become labelled as “troublemakers”, with all the moral pressure from fellow-members that implies.
But if they push for a stronger EU without bringing their own citizens on board, they can find themselves catastrophically exposed – as happened in France and the Netherlands in 2005, when disgruntled voters rejected the EU’s original draft constitution.
The political fallout of that rejection was so immense that on this occasion, member states have not yet begun to discuss how the new treaty should be ratified – even though officials insist that it must come into force before European Parliament elections in 2009.
And with governments caught between the EU’s long-term vision and their own short-term political needs, it is impossible to predict how each one’s political calculations may shape the ratification debate.
Some observers have already suggested that the only alternative to the Europe of the treaty would be a “two-speed union”, with member states picking and choosing which EU rules they want to follow.
Thursday’s meeting in Lisbon is beginning to look distinctly uncontroversial. The questions it will leave unanswered are not.