Tara McCormack
posted 11 March 2008

On the same night that the House of Commons debated the Conservative Party’s amendment to the bill that will ratify the Lisbon Treaty, Intelligence Squared held its own debate on the question of whether Britain should have a referendum on the EU treaty. Chairman Andrew Neil (publisher of the Spectator and former editor of The Sunday Times) promised the audience that, unlike the debate in the House of Commons, the Intelligence Squared debate would be exciting, non-formulaic and unpredictable. Neil was not quite right in his predictions; in fact there was little that was said that was unpredictable and exciting, but the debate was entertaining.

For those who have not been to an Intelligence Squared debate the format is as follows; on entry to the venue each audience member is asked how they would vote. Then the debate begins with three speakers arguing against the motion and three against. The floor is then opened to the audience, the speakers respond, and finally the audience cast their votes again, with the ‘before’ and ‘after’ votes announced. Speaking in favour of the motion were Norman Lamont, former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early 1990s; Neil O’Brien, director of the think tank Open Europe; and Andrew Roberts, the historian and broadcaster. On the other side were David Aaronovitch, newspaper columnist and Euston Manifesto signatory; Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford University; and Stephen Wall, a former top civil servant.

Speaking from a pro-EU but anti-Lisbon Treaty perspective, Neil O’Brien opened the debate with his arguments in favour of a referendum. O’Brien argued that the Labour Government has been fundamentally dishonest in its refusal to allow a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty because the new treaty is essentially the same as the Constitutional Treaty, as shown by Open Europe's article by article comparison of the two treaties (PDF). O’Brien stressed that the Lisbon Treaty entails an important transfer of powers to the EU, and finally, that the Treaty entirely fails to address any of the main problems facing the EU, in particular the democratic deficit. Rather, the Treaty, and the manner of the Treaties ratification, will only serve to increase the democratic deficit and the sense of disconnection between European electorates and the EU.

Stephen Wall was the first to speak against the motion. Wall argued that the hysteria over the Lisbon Treaty was misplaced. He argued that the essence and purpose of the EU has been the same – the gradual pooling of sovereignty – since Harold Macmillan had first applied to join the European Economic Community (EEC, as it was then) in the 1960s. British membership was at first rebuffed by De Gaulle, and Britain had to wait for more amiable French president in the shape of Georges Pompidou before it joined. Wall argued that the reason Britain had persisted, and successfully joined in the 1970s, and why both Margaret Thatcher and John Major had signed up to treaties that entailed a far greater transfer of sovereignty than the Lisbon Treaty will (the Single European Act [SEA] and the Treaty of European Union [TEU, commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty]) was simply that British interests were best served by this pooling of sovereignty. Wall concluded by stressing that there was nothing in the Lisbon Treaty that is inconsistent with Britain’s reasons for joining the EU in the first place.

Second to argue in favour of a referendum was Andrew Roberts. Unfortunately Roberts had little of substance to argue, his case consisted essentially of the claim that having referendums was a jolly British thing to do, and therefore we ought to do it. Roberts also argued that contrary to what Wall argued, Edward Heath had been certain that there would be no significant transfer of sovereignty when Britain joined the EEC. Vernon Bogdonor’s argument against the motion also had little of substance, relying mainly on the claim that the Lisbon Treaty was very different from the Constitutional Treaty and there was no significant transfer of power or sovereignty. This is an argument which will certainly be news to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Angela Merkel and Jose Manuel Barroso, all of whom have stated that in substance the treaties are the same.

The final speaker to argue in favour of the motion was Norman Lamont. The sheer brass neck of Lamont was impressive. The Conservative government of which he was a member, signed Britain up to the SEA and the TEU, two treaties which fundamentally transformed the relationship between the UK and the EU. Since then Lamont seems to have changed his mind and has become an outspoken eurosceptic. However, rather than stating that he has changed his mind or even making a political argument that Thatcher and Major were right and Blair wrong, Lamont relies on weazily evasion, arguing that the Lisbon Treaty represents a greater transfer of sovereignty than the SEA or TEU. His authority for this claim is David Miliband, who has stated this in a written parliamentary answer. Lamont’s argument took in most of the standard Eurosceptic arguments, from the dishonesty of the government, to the massive transfer of sovereignty in new areas of policy such as policing, immigration and criminal justice, to the fact that the Lisbon Treaty establishes a foreign minister and president, and gives the EU a legal personality. Lamont also agreed with Roberts that the EU was fundamentally different in substance from the EEC of the 1970s.

Last but not least, David Aaronovitch spoke against the motion. Aaronovitch’s formative experiences haranguing his fellow young Communist comrades in Hampstead have stood him in good stead for this sort of thing, and he gave a highly entertaining performance, barracking the audience for being, in essence, a completely unrepresentative bunch of wealthy tossers. Unfortunately his enjoyable performance was really all he had to offer, there was not much substantive argument underneath. Aaronovitch argued that a) we don’t usually have referendums so why should we have one now; and b) no normal people in Britain were interested anyway and everyone in the audience was a Johnny Foreigner hating upper class idiot who probably believed that fluoride should not be in water and that the Americans brought down the twin towers themselves.

There may have been some justice in this characterisation of the largely wealthy, bourgeois audience gathered in the Royal Geographical Society as cranks and little Englanders, but it was not representative of the questions from the floor. Whilst a few members of the audience did make what were basically ‘we’re special’ arguments (although strangely the two or three who did make this point were all people of non-British origin) most of the points from the audience concerned matters of democracy, the essential dishonesty of the government and so on. The argument that we do not usually have referendums was so weak that even Norman Lamont easily dismissed it. From Aaronovitch’s cheap arguments that if you were against the Lisbon Treaty you simply hated foreigners to the usual Eurosceptic here-comes-the-Brussels-super-state arguments, Andrew Neil had not been proved right. Most of the arguments on both sides were fairly standard and failed to engage with the heart of the matter.

Quite clearly the content of the Lisbon Treaty is, in substance, the same as the Constitutional Treaty. Equally clearly, therefore, it is undeniable that the British government is being fundamentally dishonest in its denial that this is the case. In Labour’s 2005 Manifesto (pp83-84), Labour promised a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty. The re-naming of the Treaty as the Lisbon Treaty has allowed the government to shamelessly equivocate. A constitution is not a thing in itself that transforms a state, a constitution is simply the collection of rules about how the state is governed. This can be all written down (or codified) in a single document, as it would have been with the Constitutional Treaty, but it need not be. The EU does have a constitution in the same way that Britain, although without a single codified document, has a constitution. That is, there are agreed rules about how the institutions of the EU relate to one another and how the member states relate to one another and the institutions. Does the Lisbon Treaty alter these relationships in the same way that the Constitutional Treaty would have? Yes it does. Does it transfer more power to the Council of Ministers? Yes it does.

As for the other arguments made by outraged Eurosceptics, well they are entirely true. The Lisbon Treaty does, for example, create a foreign minister and a legal personality for the EU. However, some of the Eurosceptic arguments seem to ignore the reality of the EU as it exists now. For example, much of the EU already has a legal personality, while the ‘foreign minister’ is simply a merging of two existing positions. Furthermore, the EU already conducts an enormous amount of foreign relations as the EU. For example, the EU has a central role in transforming and governing applicant states such as Turkey, Serbia and Croatia; it effectively runs Bosnia and Kosovo, and sends troops to various other states. The EU is also the biggest trading block in the world and one of the largest aid donors. Moreover, the argument made by Lamont, Roberts and to some extent O’Brien that the Lisbon Treaty represents a sea-change in British relations with the EU does not really stand up to scrutiny.

Ironically, it was the pro-EU Stephen Wall, speaking against the motion, who was the only one of the speakers who clearly understood and articulated what the EU was about, and who correctly identified the relationship between the member states and the EU. It is certainly true that far more areas of domestic policy are being governed supranationally than in the 1970s, however Wall was completely correct and very frank in his argument that the essence of the Lisbon Treaty is not in any way inconsistent with why Britain joined the EU in the first place. The dissolution of state sovereignty and the sharing of authority is, as Wall pointed out, the point of the EU. This was Heath’s motivation as it was the motivation for Thatcher and Major. (‘Preposterous!’ spluttered Lamont at this point, and neither was the Tory-voting bourgeoisie of Kensington and Chelsea buying it: they heckled Wall in defence of Heath et al.)

Even Neil O’Brien, although offering more substantive arguments, failed to understand that the democratic deficit was not a fundamental flaw in the EU, but actually one of the main points of the EU. Successive European governments have sought to insulate themselves from the democratic process in their own states. The EU has been developed by European political elites as a way of overcoming political weakness and problems at home through, as Frank Furedi has argued, outsourcing authority. Whilst perhaps few of the members of the EEC and later the EU shared or share the federalist dreams of the founding fathers of the EEC, nonetheless the EU has always been useful for politicians who want to avoid taking responsibility for unpopular decisions they would have made anyway, since they can instead blame them on ‘Europe’.

The Constitutional Treaty was a tactical mistake by European elites who sought, through talk of citizenship and flags and so on, to simulate a European political constituency which would give a framework of legitimacy for the European political elites to continue pooling their own authority. As with the preceding treaties, the Lisbon Treaty will remove more areas of policy from the direct authority and accountability of the governments of member states and, ultimately, the electorates of member states.

So, should there be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty? Aaronovitch had a point when he argued that people who want a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty actually want a referendum on the EU. I am not anti-European and I would welcome the dissolution of the borders between European states, but unlike Stephen Wall I do not think that the pooling of sovereignty as it has been done through the EU is a good thing. Anyone who believes that the electorate should be sovereign will believe that there should be a referendum on the Treaty so that we can have a proper discussion about both the Treaty and its implications for Britain in terms of locating accountability for policy decisions.

But even scrapping the Treaty will not resolve the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the EU as an organisation which allows European elites to obfuscate accountability. Moreover there is a broader problem: whilst in the past British political elites used this outsourcing of authority as a way of externally disciplining the working class, today there is no longer any class contestation. European political elites are retreating into the EU because of the shrinking of any kind of domestic political engagement which can, one way or another, give them a political project and engagement with their societies. The broader problem is at home. Scrapping the Lisbon Treaty or even the EU cannot resolve this, and nor can we even begin to think about what it really might mean to dissolve the contingent boundaries between us in Europe without addressing this problem.