Abaixo, uma colectânea de artigos sobre o referendo irlandês (são principalmente do Coment is free do Guardian e do Financial Times) - a minha última nota sobre o assunto pode ser vista aqui e cruza com muito daquilo que é dito nestes artigos (embora, não concorde com tudo o que é dito e, no caso de alguns - poucos - artigos, a minha discordância é total: ficam todos para futura referência). Vou apresentar ainda, pelo menos, outra nota com artigos sobre o mesmo.
- Shirley Williams: An Irish wake-up call Comment is free The Guardian.
...The Irish referendum result was not just about the treaty. It was an opportunity for voters to express their resentment about many things: .... But none of these are good reasons for dismissing the vote. It represents, from the country that has benefited most from the EU since it joined in 1973, the disturbing gap between public opinion and European leaders.
... By any standard, the EU has been a success. It has brought the free movement of goods, services and people to nearly 500 million citizens. It has brought democracy, an independent judiciary and the rule of law to former dictatorships - without war or loss of life. It is the world's largest source of development finance and foremost humanitarian aid donor. But it has failed to win the affection of many Europeans.
So what is to be done? The European Council, meeting later this week, should launch two working groups with a remit to report back by the end of the year, one to see what elements of the Lisbon treaty that were needed to make the enlarged union function efficiently could be introduced by cooperation between governments.
... More effective scrutiny of EU legislation, to ensure the principle of subsidiarity is respected, could be achieved by closer cooperation between parliaments. .... The second working group would propose steps to reduce the volume of EU legislation, simplify contorted language and provide explanatory memoranda.
At least as important, the council should invite each member to report on what steps it has taken to include education in citizenship, both national and European, in school curriculums.
UK citizens know very little about how the union works or what it has done. The UK has long been a semi-detached EU member. The media rarely report anything from Brussels except scandal and scare stories. The government has never seriously tried to rebut these, nor to set out the vision of a free and prosperous Europe.
In the Irish referendum, stories that the EU would impose permissive abortion laws on the republic, or jeopardise its neutrality swayed some votes. That is a reason to take seriously the EU's inability to get the facts across. And that is the lesson the European elites neglect at their peril.
Paradoxically, the Lisbon treaty made moves towards greater accountability to both European and national parliaments. It was careful to recognise members' historic legacies, like Nato membership, and allowed the UK to exclude itself from whole sections of the treaty. In all these respects, it was a considerable improvement on Nice and Maastricht, neither of which were subject to a UK referendum. But all of us have to take the democratic deficit seriously if the EU is to realise its potential for good in our troubled world. FT.com / Columnists / Wolfgang Munchau - Europe’s plan B for the Lisbon treaty
...I personally found last week’s Irish No vote shocking, not in terms of what it means for the EU, but what it says about Ireland. Ireland is one of the EU’s great success stories. Dublin has become one of the great European cities. Both Ireland and the EU should have celebrated their relationship.
... Why am I so confident that the Lisbon treaty is going to be implemented? Because, contrary to widespread protestations, Europe’s leaders actually have a plan B. ... suggested on Saturday that one way to implement the treaty was for Ireland to withdraw temporarily from the process of European integration.
...What then? Ireland could then hold a second referendum. One possibility would be to ask the same question again, but it is difficult to see what should produce a different result. Ireland has already opted out of everything it wanted to opt out of. It is difficult to formulate any specific concessions, since nobody knows what the Irish electorate wants. This suggests that the Irish problem may not be fixable through a simple declaration by the other member states. A renegotiation of the treaty is out of the question.
... So the treaty of Lisbon will be implemented one way or the other, but only if the other 26 countries continue to ratify. Otherwise, all bets are off. The biggest losers from this fiasco will be the Irish themselves. They brought the country to the brink in its relations with the EU at a time when the economy is facing the most severe crisis in living memory. I shudder to think how foreign investors are going to react, given how much Ireland relies on them for its prosperity. Faced with this situation, the strategy most likely to be successful from the perspective of the rest of the EU is to play hardball. This is plan B.FT.com / Columnists / Philip Stephens - Stop talking about Lisbon and get to work
...Does anyone really care about how Europe organises itself? Do not misunderstand. The Lisbon treaty – and the constitutional treaty before it – is not the document of eurosceptic nightmare. The claim of British Conservatives – and of many on the No side in the Irish referendum campaign – that it represents a decisive assault on the sovereignty of nation states is a delusion born of another age.
The essence of the European enterprise remains an understanding that the continent’s states can better advance their national interests through co-operation rather than competition. Nowhere is that more obvious than in places such as Beijing. Only when Europe speaks with something like one voice are others ready to pay attention.
That said, the Union has moved beyond the federalist dreams of its founding fathers. The high point was the Maastricht treaty at the beginning of the 1990s. One of the things that has struck me about the debate ever since is how both the advocates and opponents of a European superstate make the same basic mistake. If ever there was a possibility that the EU would replace national identities with a European identity, it was lost with the fall of the Berlin Wall. A Union of 27 simply does not lend itself to uniformity.
.... Institutions do matter in Europe, and the Lisbon treaty includes some useful changes. ... These gains, though, are wholly disproportionate to the political energy that has been invested in the constitutional project. The Union cannot continue squabbling about its institutional arrangements while the world moves on without it.We know that this new world will be multipolar. Europe’s prosperity and security depend on it also remaining open and multilateral. ... The bold promise of a strategic partnership with Russia has thus far been mirrored by divisions within the Union on the terms of the relationship with Moscow. Few things illustrate more clearly the need for Europe to act as one than the Kremlin’s divide-and-rule strategy on energy security. ... Fine words on climate change must not be lost to economic turbulence. ... Europe’s interest lies above all in persuading it to become a responsible stakeholder in the multilateral system. And if Brussels stops talking about Lisbon, they might actually pay attention in Beijing.
Parag Khanna and Alpo Rusi: The EU's destiny is to lead the world on security, trade and climate change Comment is free The Guardian
This past week saw not only the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty, forcing a crisis summit this week to chart an alternative path to EU continuity, but also the annual EU-American summit in Slovenia, aiming to forge a common transatlantic agenda on Middle East peace, climate change and trade. The Irish vote is likely to fuel rumours of the EU's demise, yet it is the latter summit that will prove more revealing about its future. While mending transatlantic divides is commendable, the summit presents an opportunity to rectify misperceptions about the US leading and Europe following on global issues. No matter who occupies the White House, the actual trend is the reverse. On May 23 in Brasilia, a treaty was signed to establish Unasur, the South American union of nations. It was the most recent example of the real geopolitical revolution that has been under way since the end of the second world war: the regionalisation of international relations on the precedent set by the six nations who established the Treaty of Rome, which became the European Economic Community in 1957.
...A world of regions still needs leadership, but not necessarily a single leader. While many have fretted that Europe follows the US without providing an alternative course, in fact the EU has been providing this model for decades, and it is bearing fruit around the developing world, despite the US's post-9/11 actions, which have served only to discredit the west. Today the EU provides more than itself as an institutional model. Its emissions trading system is the world's leading carbon market and a model progressive US voices yearn to replicate. It is the largest aid donor and market for goods from developing countries.
...Europe has become the gold standard for creating such institutions, and is far better poised than the US to be the arbiter of disputes among them. A future concert of powers among the US, China and EU - capable of setting basic global standards and leveraging the adherence of other major powers such as Russia and India - is a vision with which Americans should be familiar, for it resembles Roosevelt's "Four Policemen". ... But among these three, the EU has the most credibility today, and must ensure that the other two do not return the 21st century to the 19th. (Continua)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário