Walker's World: Another EU shoe to drop

BRUSSELS, June 25 (UPI) -- After one of those all-night psychodramas, purporting to be a negotiating session, in which the European Union specializes, 27 tired heads of government produced a predictable compromise.

Germany will get the increased voting weight in EU councils to which it is entitled by its population of 81 million, but not until 2014 thanks to impassioned Polish opposition. The British, thanks to Tony Blair's last stand, will get a special waiver on the application of some European laws that could affect its flexible labor market and venerable judicial system.

But these waivers will likely be eroded over time by the clever lawyers of the European Court of Justice, who have waged a slow but effective guerrilla war against the proud independence of a British legal system that dates back eight centuries to the Magna Carta.

So what was all the fuss about? The EU elites, who never accepted the No votes of the Dutch and French referendums against the draft constitution, were determined to push on with the grand project of European integration whatever the voters might think they had decided. As Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister, said at the time: "If the referendum succeeds, we go forward; if its fails, we continue."

The elites have now got their way, renaming the constitution a "mini-Treaty" which is too modest to require a referendum and can be ratified by a simple vote in each national parliament. Tony Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, will therefore inherit a crisis when Blair steps down this week.

The Euroskeptic media and the Conservative opposition and much of public opinion are already grumbling that once again the British people have been robbed of their rights by the wily Europeans.

"Referendum demand over Blair's sellout," was the headline in the Sunday Telegraph. William Hague, who will be foreign secretary if the Conservative Party wins the next election, claimed that a clause intended to exempt Britain from a common EU foreign policy had no legal force and was only a declaration of intent. And even though the British have secured a change in the name of the proposed new EU foreign minister to "High Representative," Blair accepted the principle that there would be EU embassies and an EU foreign service in all but name.

"When you examine the small print it is clear that Blair's so-called safeguards have no legal guarantees at all," Hague said. "This is typical of the government's approach to the negotiation on this vital treaty, which undoubtedly shifts power from Britain to the EU."

Brown's problems with this new EU do not end there. He had his own telephone row with Blair late Friday night, after France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy secured a change in the wording of one of the key clauses of the treaty, softening Europe's traditional commitment to "unfettered competition." The head of the competition department of the EU Commission was so worried by this that he began ringing round various governments, warning them that the French were introducing a major policy change through the back door.

In the end, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chaired the summit and was determined to secure a successful outcome, pledged a separate declaration to assert the commitment to competition. She also made another key move, threatening the Poles with another summit that would include all the other 26 EU member states except them if they did not swallow a reasonable compromise on the vexed issues of relative voting weights.

The summit discussions on this issue were intense and bitter. The Germans claimed that their 81 million people were entitled to more votes than the 35 million Poles. The Poles retorted that if it weren't for the invasion and occupation of Poland by Hitler's Germany in World War II, the Poles would by now be a nation of 66 million.

The Poles were finally brought round to a compromise by France's President Sarkozy, who made a powerful debut on the European stage, appointing himself Merkel's "ambassador" to the Poles. It was an initiative that carried a subtle message, that while the Germans with their burden of history could not deal with the Poles, the French could, and one that demonstrated that France was back at the heart of European affairs as an essential half of the Franco-German axis that had long been the EU's driving force.

But while the weary EU leaders left the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels thinking that they had achieved a workable compromise, there are second shoes to drop all across the continent. The Dutch have yet to convince their people that the emollient form of words the treaty draft now contains on greater powers for national parliaments will be enough to reconcile Dutch voters to the negation of their referendum vote.

The Danes and the Irish must put this latest deal to their voters in two new referendums in order to make it into law. The Irish, who jealously guard their neutrality against the vast majority of the EU states who are members of NATO, could have trouble with the new powers over foreign policy, and the Danes are inherently suspicious of granting more powers to the EU.

Above all, the British have yet to work through their own internal battle over whether or not there should be a referendum, a battle all the more difficult in that Blair will have left the stage, Gordon Brown will be trying to assert himself, and the shadow of the next general elections and a possible Conservative government is starting to loom. This latest EU psychodrama is far from over.