By the way, do these treaties always get passed by a referendum in every member state? Did the Maastricht treaty really get passed that way? It was a pretty big deal, so I wonder exactly how it got done. It sort of “made” the EU in my mind.
Regardless, Europe needs to decide how far it’s going to go. You can only go as far as the lowest common denominator as far as integration, and there’s a hell of a lot of denominators these days.
I think I’d be pro-Europe, because I believe the eventual benefits from a United Europe would outweigh the sovereignty that you’d have to cede. I don’t think doing it the shady way would be that bad. People will judge the treaty based on how it affects them, not on how it was passed. There will be a bit of ill will, for sure, but that might not matter.
The point is though, that you guys are going to have to decide where you want to go. And if the answer to that question is “More Federal” then at some point you’re going to have to cede some important power. Maybe you don’t want to go all the way to USA levels of federal-ness. Maybe you’d just like what you have now, but just a bit tidied up, and solidified. That seems like that is what the latest treaty is meant to do, but Europe’s ever-increasing Mission creep is built-in to those expectations. I think a nice long break from the advance would do wonders. It’d let people relax a bit and get used to the status quo of the EU for a while. The EU is ever-changing. Maybe it needs to sit still for a while? But there needs to be a way for the populace to say, “Look we just need to think for a bit…It’s not to say we don’t like the EU, or that we want to get rid of it, just get off our backs for a minute” Rejecting the treaty doesn’t really allow that kind of answer. There is no way to approve of the status quo. A sort of integration interim could be used to sort of get a feeling of how people feel about the EU and where exactly its boundaries are. The idea of where its boundaries are needs to be explored completely and understood completely. This is obviously going to change, but it needs to be understood at least in the meantime.
If the consensus is more federalism then things need to change. Make it possible to back out at any stage, but only offer complete secession as an answer. I realize this is a hard ball tactic, but you can’t continue to make it allowing the Denmark / Sweden / UK’s to pick and choose what they want. This of course has to be coupled with higher democratic accountability. Let there be higher accountability to those who decide what the course will be, yet at the same time make their choices a bit more binding.
But the only way this sort of approach would be successful is if the EU can decide as a group that it wants to go more federal. If it can do that, and actually agree on some kind of model, then this would be the way to do it, I think.
