THE GOVERNMENT'S White Paper on the European Union's reform treaty, published yesterday, aims to set out in a fair and factual manner how it changes the EU's functioning. It succeeds well in this task and can be recommended as a clear guide to what is usually presented as a complex document that is difficult for citizens to understand. The text explains how the treaty is structured and each section is usefully accompanied by an account of how and why the Government took the position it did during the negotiations.
The White Paper goes back to the treaty's origins in a declaration on the EU's future adopted at the final session of the Nice Treaty negotiations in December 2000, calling for strengthened and reformed institutions and structures to deal with its forthcoming enlargement. That led on to the Laeken Declaration in December 2001, to the broad-based Convention on the Future of Europe in 2002-03 and then to the inter-governmental conference which concluded in agreement on the constitutional treaty in 2003-4 under Ireland's EU presidency. That treaty fell in the French and Dutch referendums of 2005, even though most other EU member states ratified it. Recognising those realities the reform treaty was negotiated to a conclusion in 2007.
This substantial history of deliberation, argument and bargaining is important because it determines most of the treaty's contents. Although the symbolism and unitary structure of the constitutional treaty has been discarded, most of its institutional and decision-making changes have been preserved. The immediate form of the Lisbon Treaty is obscure to the lay person, consisting as it does of legal amendments to previous treaties. When the texts are consolidated this obscurity recedes. The function of this White Paper is to make them accessible to citizens so that an informed debate is possible ahead of and during the forthcoming referendum, expected to take place on June 12th.
As the White Paper explains, the Lisbon Treaty (known as the reform treaty before it was signed in the Portuguese capital last December) consists of two sets of amendments to the existing EU treaties. The first set contains amendments to the Treaty on European Union agreed at Maastricht in 1992, while the second amends the treaty establishing the European Community agreed originally in 1957 and gives it a new name - the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Presented this way they are readable and comprehensible documents for those who wish to know their contents.