Critics say EU cannot be built up without popular consent

Campaigners against the Lisbon Treaty across Europe are seeking to
capitalise on the Irish No vote, write *Derek Scally* and *Isabel
Conway* .

AS THE DUST settles after Ireland's referendum result, opponents of
the Lisbon Treaty are emerging once more across the Continent.

It comes as little surprise that the most energy is emanating from The
Netherlands and France, where organised campaigners brought
ratification of the constitutional treaty to a screeching halt in 2005.

One of the best organised movements is Attac, a group critical of
globalisation, which has local branches in 14 European countries. It
is calling for a "social, ecological and democratic Europe" and
opposes what it sees as an EU neo-liberal bias.

"I think people who voted No are coming together, united around a new
platform that the EU has to become more democratic," said political
scientist Susan George, former vice-president of Attac in France.

"We can't say where this is going. What we hope is that European
leaders will start listening to us, that we consider undemocratic the
Europe they are proposing. We are afraid that EU leaders are going to
cause huge problems for themselves by plunging on ahead after the
Irish vote." Many Attac branches are calling for an EU-wide debate and
the election of a constituent assembly - including citizens - to write
a new constitution to be put to the vote across the EU on the same day.

Besides Attac, French opponents of the constitutional treaty range
across the spectrum, from communists and dissident socialists to
right-wing populist parties. One of France's most prominent No
campaigners in 2005, former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius,
said the lesson of the Irish vote was that it is impossible to build
the EU without popular consent.

"Such agreement is only achievable if the concrete focus of Europe is
more democratic and more social, more environmental and simpler," he
said in an interview in Le Parisien.

"Quite apart from the method of European construction, its direction
has been brought into question: citizens are in favour of Europe, but
a Europe that is committed to solidarity and which is their project."

French senator Jean-Luc Mélenchon, one of the key Socialist figures in
the 2005 campaign, urged EU leaders to "examine their consciences" and
learn the lesson of producing "unintelligible texts to conceal the
liberal essence" of the EU's politics.

In The Netherlands, Lisbon Treaty opponents hope that a revamped
campaign, "Voor een andere Europa" (For another Europe), can stop the
"rubber-stamped" ratification in the Dutch senate next month. It
collected 42,000 signatures before the Dutch parliament passed the
treaty with the support of the main political parties.

Yesterday, its founder and spokesman Willem Bos said: "we are calling
our new campaign Irish Spring, because it has breathed new life into
our fight to let the people discuss the kind of Europe they want, and
not have it done on their behalf by elitist bureaucrats in Brussels."

Dutch campaigners hope that the looming senate vote will, after the
Irish decision, be more than the expected formality. "When Dutch
voters three years ago said No to a constitution for Europe, our prime
minister Jan Peter Balkenende declared the constitution dead; if we
ignore the democratic process in Ireland we are saying that their vote
doesn't matter, that it is less important than what French and Dutch
voters decided," said Mr Bos.

Dutch European affairs spokesman for the Socialists, Harry van Bommel,
said "everything has changed with this rejection of the Lisbon Treaty
in Ireland; it was a thinly-disguised alternative, 95 per cent similar
to what Dutch and French voters shot down." A weekend poll showed the
Dutch would have rejected the Lisbon Treaty by a comfortable majority
had a referendum been held here.

Across the border in Germany, the year-old Left Party was the only
mainstream party to oppose the Lisbon Treaty. EU spokesman Deither
Dehm said the Irish No has seen the "complete collapse of the EU
turbo-capitalism strategy". The challenge now, he says, is to transfer
Lisbon opponents from a "No track" to a "Yes track". "We have to say
we want a constitution of peaceful, democratic, social integration,"
he said.

"Any new constitution must have nuances against rigorous market
dominance, to be able to act as a counter force." He cites as an
example the tone of Germany's post-war constitution, stating that
"human dignity is inviolable" or, in article 15, that land, natural
resources and means of production can be transferred into public
ownership "for the purpose of socialisation".

Bavarian MP Peter Gauweiler, who has launched a constitutional
challenge to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, said: "Our long-term
goal should be for all of us to have the same rights in the EU as the
Irish, in particular for referenda." The Irish vote has been a shot in
the arm for opponents of the Lisbon Treaty in many EU member states.

But some political observers from new member states suggest it is
going too far to suggest that unhappiness about any perceived
democratic deficit is an EU-wide phenomenon. "Any country that joined
in 2004 hasn't profoundly felt or understood that there is such a
thing as a democratic deficit," said Piotr Kaczynski, a Polish
research fellow at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies.

"Surveys show that people in new member states trust European
solutions more than national governments. The new member states have
given the EU institutions new legitimacy to act on their behalf."

Just as EU leaders admit it is too early to predict with certainty the
future of the Lisbon Treaty, leading opponents say it's too soon to
say whether they will succeed in creating a coherent EU-wide movement
to change the treaty or the Union that created it.