Instead of bullying the Irish, Europe should be working on plan D - and E

This article originally appeared in The Guardian. 

After the Irish "no" vote, the question Europe faces is: does Germany really want to remain in this European Union? Yes, Germany. I write as someone who thinks the EU needs the institutional reforms in the Lisbon treaty and regrets that a majority of Irish voters rejected it - from a gallimaufry of motives, it seems, some having little to do with the real content of the treaty. But I was shocked by initial reactions from the German foreign and interior ministers, the tone and implication of which was: silly little Irish voters, go away and come back with the right answer, otherwise we'll have to kick you out into the cold. (Foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier suggested Ireland might "clear the way for an integration of the remaining 26".) Or we Germans, French and other good Europeans will go ahead on our own, in a "core Europe". The mailed fist was barely even graced with a velvet glove.

"It cannot be," said interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble, an old advocate of a core Europe, "that a few million Irish make the decision for 495 million Europeans." That would be right if the EU were a direct democracy; but it isn't a direct democracy, or only in that lesser part of its legitimation that flows through direct elections to the European parliament. The EU - this EU, the only real, existing EU, the best EU we've got - is still mainly an indirect democracy: meaning that each democratic member-state has to reach its own decision in its own way. That's time-consuming. As in a convoy, or an extended family, everything takes longer. Slower ships and curmudgeonly cousins must be attended to. But that's exactly what it means to be a European Union, not a hegemon-dominated alliance or a United States of Europe.

It's true that, even under the existing treaties, smaller groups of states who want to work more closely together in particular policy areas can do so. Hence the Schengen area (without border controls) and the eurozone. So Germany might want to suggest such an "enhanced cooperation" grouping for, say, economic governance in the eurozone. Fine. Go ahead. But on the EU's central institutional arrangements and its external relations - the two big things the Lisbon treaty tries to address - this is, as soon as you stop to examine it, a complete non-starter. Worried about the EU being weak and divided, you would end up making it weaker and more divided.

Tactically, in any case, this was the worst possible way to respond. Nothing could be better calculated to ensure that the Irish say "no" a second time - assuming their government dares to ask them again, which it's far from certain it will. The contrast with German reactions to the French "no" in 2005 is striking. When the French say "no", Europe has a problem. When Ireland says "no", Ireland has a problem. There's one law for the big and another for the small.

Fortunately these were just first reactions. While frustration and private impatience remain, EU leaders, including the wise and consensus-building German chancellor, Angela Merkel, are now preparing to give the Irish government what it has been privately pleading for: time and space to work out what to do next. That's the likely spirit of the European Council that convenes in Brussels today.

Inevitably, there's talk of a plan B. The truth is that Europe is now working on plan D, and should be thinking about plan E. Let me explain. Plan A was to have a European constitution. What came out of the constitutional covention led by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and the subsequent inter-governmental mill was already much less: no longer a constitution, just a "constitutional treaty", or plan B. When France and Holland - two heartlands of a presumptive "core Europe" - said "no" to that, European leaders regrouped and went for plan C: the still more modest Lisbon treaty.

Now plan D is for the rest to go ahead and ratify, starting with Britain in the House of Lords last night, and then for the Irish government to come to the European Council in October with suggestions for a package they might take back to change their voters' minds. For example, there might be "explanatory protocols" giving assurances on abortion, Irish neutrality, corporation tax and anything else held to have fed Irish fears. Many Irish voters particularly dislike the idea of losing their European commissioner, a concern shared by other small countries. You can't change that without changing the Lisbon treaty, which would mean restarting the whole ratification round in 27 countries. But, ingenious euro-sages suggest, you might craft a crafty promise of restoring one commissioner per country, perhaps to be done, along with other revisions, as part of the accession treaty for Croatia in around 2010. (I call this the Croatian Gambit.) And so on.

Even if the Eurosceptic Polish and Czech presidents don't deliver a coup de grace to the Lisbon treaty by engineering a second "no" (my hunch: they won't), I would only give this plan D a 60-40 chance of success. If I were Irish, I'd be feeling pretty cussed by now. And if I were the Irish prime minister, I'd want to be pretty sure of winning before I risked my political life on a second vote. So we should be thinking of plan E as well.

Plan E has three parts. The first is to continue working under the existing treaties. The plain fact is that the enlarged EU of 27 is still functioning "under Nice". It has not ground to a halt, as some predicted.

The second part is to see how many of the institutional changes that we really do need - to make an enlarged EU work better, and be more effective in the world - could be implemented without a new grand treaty. I've been asking this question of experts on the legal-institutional workings of the EU over the past few days, and the answer is: a surprisingly large number. I won't bore you with the details, which would make a Jesuit blush, but it turns out that, given ingenuity and political will, things like a more consolidated foreign policy apparatus with a single head could probably be made to happen anyway. Where there's a will there's a way. So this would be what the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has called "Nice plus".

The third part of plan E is the most important of all. While resolving this decade-long institutional tangle as best we can, we would go on actually doing things that matter to Europeans and to the world. When the new US president is elected this autumn, he should find in his in-tray a memo from Europe spelling out what we see as the biggest challenges in the world and what we propose to do about them.

Plan D is the least-worst institutional way forward for now and the Lisbon treaty is still worth having if we can achieve it by all-round consent. But if we can't, and if we pay attention to all three parts of plan E, then that E could stand not just for Exhaustion but also for Europe.

www.timothygartonash.com

Timothy Garton Ash is a Member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and Professor of European Studies at Oxford Universit.