Archive for October, 2009

I get the impression that the Lisbon Treaty is backfiring somewhat and no-one wants to talk about it too much at the moment. The Treaty was supposed to consolidate and simplify the EU’s powers and make the running of the machine more straightforward. But we can see in retrospect that the second Irish vote, in exchange for guarantees that will be legally formalised at a later date, has undermined this.

The Irish second vote created a precedent. Vaclav Klaus, in stalling on the treaty, is really only doing what the Irish as a whole did. They didn’t like Lisbon so they obstructed it temporarily until concessions were made. Klaus is doing the same, but in the Czech Republic there have been no referendums on the treaty, so he has taken what superficially looks like a different path of one-man obstructionism. But in the end it amounts to the same thing as the Irish — holding up the treaty to get particular guarantees in the national interest, in the Czech case on the Benes Decrees.

Of course if Klaus gets his way — and why shouldn’t he if the Irish got theirs? — others might start to push for their own concessions, as a recent EU Observer article explains.

But a far more serious booby-trap is waiting in Germany, where the Constitutional Court, in its judgement at the end of June, said the Lisbon Treaty did nothing to correct the EU’s “structural democratic deficit”. Because of this, the Court effectively reserved to itself the power to protect the German Basic Law and the rights of German citizens, should the EU overreach itself. In practical terms, this means the German court may overturn rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), potentially putting a serious brake on further EU integration.

A test case relating to employment law is working its way through the system in Germany. The case — the Mangold case — concerns a finding against Germany by the ECJ over age discrimination. Should the German court decide the ECJ went too far and reverse the Mangold decision, it could change the balance of power between the EU and member states. I’m not sure the implications of this have so far sunk in in Brussels. The German judges are due to pronounce by the end of the year.