The ‘Promise’ of the Lisbon Treaty: A Critical Reading

At the conclusion of a high-stakes public campaign, French and Dutch voters rejected, in May and June 2005 respectively, the Constitutional Treaty that had previously been approved by EU heads of states and governments on 29 October 2004 in Rome. Such a major blow to the ratification process threw the EU into a profound, but not entirely unexpected, political crisis. However, the Constitutional Treaty — which was meant to be replaced by a reform treaty, as agreed to by EU leaders in Lisbon on 13 December 2007 — was viewed by many as a rather modest step towards the constitutionalisation of the treaty framework. Most analysts have asserted that the whole constitutional project was expected to contribute to a more balanced form of decision-making in an enlarged EU-27, coupled with a strengthening of the EU's institutional capacity to act in a more coherent and coordinated manner regarding its external relations (through a European Foreign Affairs Minister, who would also serve as a member of the Commission — a provision, however, that was not part of the Lisbon Treaty).

Overall, the causes for rejecting the Constitutional Treaty were mainly nationally driven. Taken together, these produced an ideologically incoherent yet discernible block of votes against ratification. This does not imply that greater democracy in the larger polity can only be an outcome of integration, since the French and Dutch voters exercised their equally democratic right to oppose the enactment of a major treaty reform for which they had little democratic input. Be that as it may, had the Treaty been ratified by all its signatories, the EU would have continued to rest primarily on a dynamic set of treaty-based rules or, at best, on a quasi-constitutional system of checks and balances designed to organise authority within a non-state polity. Yet by virtue of its integrative and symbolic nature, the Constitutional Treaty promised a new constitutional ordering, albeit of a (much) less federalist type than a conventional constitutional settlement. In other words, the Treaty was not meant to take the EU towards a post-national state of play (Habermas, 2003).