FRENCH REACTION:FRENCH PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy pledged yesterday to visit Ireland to find out why voters rejected the Lisbon Treaty.
After meeting central European leaders in the Czech Republic - which is deeply divided over whether to ratify the treaty - he also denounced talk of a "two-speed" European Union in which countries that ratified the charter would press ahead with key reforms, while nay-sayers were left behind.
"I would like to travel to Ireland to find out under what conditions we could minimise this problem," said Mr Sarkozy, who is a leading advocate of a treaty that is intended to ease the running of the enlarged EU and facilitate further expansion.
"We shall not create gaps between those who have ratified, those who will ratify and the one country which rejected the Lisbon Treaty," he added, insisting that the EU would find an appropriate response to Ireland's No vote at a summit in Brussels later this week.
France will take over the EU's rotating presidency in July, and pass it on six months later to the Czech Republic, where eurosceptic president Vaclav Klaus has already declared the treaty dead and buried. The parties that comprise the Czech coalition government have starkly different views on the treaty's merits.
The Czech constitutional court is due to rule on the treaty's legality in the autumn, but Mr Sarkozy had heaped pressure on Prague after Ireland's No vote by urging all other EU members to ratify the document "so that the Irish incident does not become a crisis".
However, he struck a more moderate tone after meeting the Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Slovak prime ministers in Prague. "No one should have the feeling that he is being pushed anywhere," Mr Sarkozy said.
"We must not rush or dramatise anything. We will surely find the best way how to find unity in the European family on Thursday and Friday," he added, referring to this week's gathering of EU leaders in the Belgian capital.
While the outspoken president Klaus called the Irish vote "a victory for freedom and reason over artificial elitist projects and European bureaucracy", Czech premier Mirek Topolanek called it a "political complication" that should be dealt with calmly.
"I do not think anybody has a completely clear idea in respect of continuing the ratification process," he said. "The discussion here is whether in case of the Irish No it is even possible and legitimate to continue ratification."
Unlike most of the former communist states to join the EU in 2004 and 2007, the Czech Republic is deeply sceptical about a treaty that would allow more EU decisions to be taken by a majority vote rather than consensus, and would provide the bloc with a long-term president and a foreign policy chief.
Mr Topolanek leads a coalition that is at odds over the treaty, with the Green Party supporting it but leading members of his own party, the Civic Democrats, issuing its death notice. "If one country refuses, that means the project is over in its entirety," said party vice-president, Petr Necas. "It makes no sense to continue the ratification of a dead document."