Europe holds its breath ahead of Irish referendum

Jun 10, 2008, 11:32 GMT

Brussels - As Ireland counts down for the European Union's only referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, EU and Irish leaders are holding their collective breath as they hope to avoid disaster.

On Friday an opinion poll published in the Irish Times showed the no camp five points ahead of the yes, for the first time since the campaign began.

That poll has set nerves jangling in Brussels, as experts warn that a rejection of the treaty could throw the EU into confusion.

'There is no Plan B: if there was a no, in Ireland or in another country, it would have a very negative effect for the EU,' the head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said on May 26.

'If you had a no vote based on a high turnout, the EU's back might be forced against the wall,' Hugo Brady, of the London-based Centre for European Reform, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Three years ago, voters in France and the Netherlands threw the EU into political turmoil by rejecting the grandly-titled Constitutional Treaty - a text aimed at giving the bloc a new role in the world.

It took member states 18 months of paralysis and a year of all-night wrangling at summits to come up with a replacement - the Lisbon treaty which is the subject of Thursday's Irish vote.

Ominously, just as in the French and Dutch votes, opinion polls now show that Ireland's yes campaign is struggling to gain ground, despite the support of all major political groups.

'The campaign has been set up and framed by the no vote: the yes camp is trying at the last moment to regain the momentum,' Piotr Kaczynski, an expert on EU constitutional affairs at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, said.

Observers agree that the impact of a no vote could, if it were based on a high turnout (approaching 50 per cent), bring the process of EU reform to an abrupt and painful end.

A resounding no vote would 'pretty much mean closing the (EU) constitutional process ... You could forget about treaty reform in the EU-27,' Kaczynski said.

It could even trigger an EU-wide upheaval, potentially splitting the bloc into a 'two-speed Europe.'

Member states 'could abandon the (27-member) treaty and push ahead with smaller groups' on specific issues, relegating opponents of deeper union to 'second-tier membership,' Brady said.

Indeed, experts say that if the Lisbon Treaty fails, states which favour closer integration could decide that it is time to forge ahead with what the treaty calls 'enhanced cooperation' with a select group of partners - leaving the rest in the cold.

'The Lisbon Treaty allows 'enhanced cooperation,' but it sets rules - for example, that you can't block anyone from joining it if they fulfil the criteria. If the enhanced cooperation is done outside the treaties, those rules aren't clear,' Kaczynski warned.

In the short term, those doomsday scenarios seem unlikely to become reality. In the three years since the French and Dutch referenda, the EU has not only managed to keep functioning, it has even enlarged to take in two new members, Romania and Bulgaria.

And while no less a figure than Barroso himself warned, before the French vote, that there was 'no Plan B,' the EU survived to approve just such a Plan B: the Lisbon treaty itself.

But a no vote would, most certainly, cast the spotlight on Brussels, as the EU's leaders - scheduled to hold a summit in the city on June 19 - debate why the world's biggest trading bloc finds it so hard to win the support of its own people.

And with issues from oil and food prices to climate change crowding onto the agenda, the last thing the bloc can afford is yet another summit dominated by agonised soul-searching.

No wonder they are holding their breath in Brussels.