Nice Treaty

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

CounterPunch
October 5, 2002

The Nice Treaty Up for a Vote Again
Ireland Rattles the Foundations of the New Europe
by HARRY BROWNE

While international election-junkies get their fix analysing polls and
results in Germany, Brazil and the US, they're only now beginning to
notice the referendum due to take place on October 19th here on Europe's
offshore isle. At the risk of appearing parochial: what's at stake here
in Ireland is perhaps more fundamentally important than any of those
other electoral spats--it's the institutional future of the world's
nascent superpower, the European Union (EU). And Ireland's position, as
it prepares to vote for a second time on the EU's Nice Treaty, is
putting that future very much in doubt.

The reasons this vote has turned out to be so fraught, unique and
important are fluky and contingent. As anyone who has travelled around
the single-currency continent lately can testify, the union, comprising
at present 15 member states, has been politically "integrating" in
stages--leaving behind its old status as the European Economic
Community--with a new treaty every few years to spell out the evolving
arrangements. The Treaty of Nice, agreed in 2000 at a meeting in the
French resort, is just the latest stage: it sets things up for a
dramatic expansion of the EU to the east--in part by giving more
decision-making weight to the bigger west-European powers and removing
the requirement of unanimity for more Euro-decisions.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/browne1005.html

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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