Welcome to Amsterdamspeak. The buzzwords to be assimilated in the run-up to referendum day when the Republic votes on the latest steps towards European integration are: subsidiarity, proportionality, transparency and flexibility.
Yes, they are ugly, jargonistic and inacessible (like most Eurospeak), but there is a difference this time, according to Euro buzzword expert, Dr Grainne de Burca, a lecturer in law at Oxford University.
For the first time Eurocrats are attempting to be user-friendly. The cumbersome, if not impossible, wording of previous treaties is being cast aside in many respects.
The language of the Amsterdam Treaty is an attempt to abandon the horrible phraseology of the past in an effort to get nearer to us European citizens. It is a shift to "new Labour language" - as in Blairist sweetness and light - an attempt to inject a warm and cuddly feel.
Unfortunately, subsidiarity and proportionality were born out of the Maastricht Treaty, and so cannot be readily dropped. In any event, the EU has always attempted to find buzzwords to hook on to its treaties in an attempt to define their essence or flavour, she told the conference at Trinity College.
With the Single European Act, it was the "internal market" and "1992", though she did not think anybody could make a distinction between such a market and "common market". With Maastricht, people were becoming more educated about Europe and yet conscious of its associated bureaucracy and the undemocratic way it could be run.
The talk was of legitimacy and reform, from which subsidiarity emerged. "The flavour of Maastricht was subsidiarity. Its essence: about getting the community to justify its need for actions at community level rather than at memberstate level."
The notion was and is complex, but there's a democratic part to it and one to do with decision-making at the level closest to the citizen. With it came proportionality. Its key flavour is "restraint, action no further than necessary". Hence we had a community looking more closely at itself.
Transparency emerged at that time, too, but maybe not as obviously. Its start-out was the view that the EU was remote, bureaucratic, complex, secretive, not easy to access (even for the media). In short, people did not know how it functioned. The extent of popular alienation was blatantly clear.
Hence three out of the four words were part of the agenda when Maastricht was being deliberated upon. And so the key term of Amsterdam is "flexibility", with a fair bit of innovation thrown in. "That is the mood of the Community as it heads towards enlargement," Dr de Burca said.
Flexibility meant that not every state must do everything together. States can act at different speeds, or not at all. It is an acknowledgment that, with enlargement, it would be very difficult for everyone to continue at the same pace. The Schengen provisions on movement of people within Europe were not being universally adopted: equally there was the option of "constructive abstention" on defence issues.
Maastricht was about grand political ideas; political and monetary union. Amsterdam, Dr de Burca added, is about consolidation and reform, adjustment rather than major change with a new "looser, lighter and less binding" type of regime.
It remains to be seen if Irish voters will at least see the light, even if they are not immediately taken-in by the new "Euro feelgood factor".
