Charlemagne: The great unravelling

A French no would lead to a nasty period for the European Union

“THERE is no plan B” may be the most hackneyed phrase in the Brussels lexicon, trotted out whenever any EU scheme runs into trouble. But when it comes to the growing possibility that French voters will reject the new EU constitutional treaty in a referendum on May 29th, it rings true: there really is no plan B, or at least none that makes much sense.

Getting the constitution through was always going to be hard. It must be ratified by all 25 EU countries before it can come into force. But all the plan Bs so far have envisaged rejection by a small country, like Denmark, or a semi-detached one, such as Britain. A French non would be different. France was one of the six countries that got the European project going in the 1950s. Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, two Frenchmen, are seen as “founding fathers” of European unity; another, Jacques Delors, as the most successful European Commission president to date; yet another, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, chaired the convention that drafted the constitution. The French, unlike the British (or Danes), have adopted the single currency, the euro.

Despite all this, a string of opinion polls suggests that the no campaign is well ahead in France. President Jacques Chirac's intervention in the debate on April 14th, in a televised discussion with youngsters, has backfired, with the no vote gaining ground afterwards. A French rejection could also trigger a Dutch no in their referendum just three days later. Such a double blow would not only hit believers in “ever closer union”. It would also present some huge practical problems.

Faced with these, the new buzzword in Brussels is “de-dramatisation”: stay calm and stick together. The EU can keep functioning on the basis of its current rule-book, set out in the Nice treaty and its predecessors. Some may argue for pressing ahead with the ratification of the constitution (six EU countries have already passed it, with Greece doing so this week), in the hope that the document might yet be saved in some way. In the past, countries that rejected a treaty have been offered a few concessions and prevailed upon to vote again. But France is too big, and French objections to the constitution too large and inchoate, to be treated like this. Anyway, if the French could not get a constitution they liked from a convention that took place before EU expansion and was chaired by a former French president, it is hard to see how they could get a better one now.

If it were accepted that the constitution had been killed off, attention would turn to various clever technical fixes. Many of the constitution's provisions, such as a new EU diplomatic service, could be prised out of the document, and adopted by simple agreement between heads of state. Changes in the EU's voting system, or the abandonment of national vetoes over various EU policies, which clearly require changes to existing treaties, could then be put in a new slimmed-down document (“just one page”, says a Brussels optimist) and pushed through national parliaments, with no need for pesky referendums.

Legally, all this might be possible. But it would ignore the new and unpredictable political mood that would surely follow from a French no. Fed up with the economic and political consequences of EU enlargement, France might be tempted to push for a radical reorganisation of the EU around the original six members. A country that is into its fifth republic would have no fear of a second EU. But the difficulty with French day-dreams of this sort is that, after a referendum failure, Mr Chirac would be too enfeebled politically to launch any such initiative. And the Germans, France's indispensable partners, might anyway be disinclined to follow him.

France might instead lapse into a long-term obstructionism that would make Britain look like a model European. After the French National Assembly rejected the European Defence Community in 1954, it took almost four decades to revive the issue of defence co-operation. A backlash against more EU enlargement could also follow. Plans for membership talks with Turkey in October might be put on hold. Even Bulgaria and Romania, with which the EU has now signed accession treaties, might be victims: their membership still has to be ratified by France.

The other great French bugbear, during the referendum campaign, has been “ultra-liberalism” being pushed in Brussels. Anything that looked like further liberalisation - above all the hated “Bolkestein directive” freeing trade in services - would surely run into ferocious French opposition. EU budget negotiations would also be tougher, with France determined both to hang on to farm subsidies and to scrap the British budget rebate.

The project unravelled

In Brussels, the gloomy talk is of a “period of stagnation”, after a French no. That is the most plausible outcome, and few EU citizens would notice the difference. But there is a worse possibility: that the EU might begin to break down. National governments, many of them in serious economic difficulty, might be tempted to seize on the unpopularity of the EU and ignore inconvenient edicts from Brussels. This process is well established for the euro. Germany and France have persistently breached the rules on budget deficits; deficits in Greece, Italy and Portugal are all soaring. This unravelling of EU discipline over the euro might spread to other areas.

True believers might bemoan this trend, but they may have only themselves to blame. Eurosceptics have long predicted that deeper integration based on shallow popular support would spark a backlash. And not just Eurosceptics. A year before the constitutional convention met, Frits Bolkestein, then a European commissioner, commented that “it would be a risky business to work towards a federal Europe, since there is a good chance of failure and Europe might then end up on the road to disintegration as a kind of reaction.” Perhaps the French should have listened to Mr Bolkestein, after all.

Commentary feature which says that a French 'No' in the May 2005 referendum would lead to a nasty period for the European Union

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