Reuters

FROM lamp-posts all over Dublin, a nice-looking woman smiled at passers-by. “It's simple,” the poster read; “I'm safer in Europe”. What her safety had to do with the Lisbon treaty—a series of technical if important changes to the EU's internal rule book—was less clear than the veiled threat: Ireland's European partners were not in a mood to tolerate a second display of dissent, only 15 months after the first.

Pro-Lisbon campaigners hinted that Ireland would be ejected from the European mainstream if it voted No again. Business leaders suggested that foreign multinationals would shun the place (no matter that grumpy, Eurosceptic Britain is an EU champion at attracting foreign direct investment). Such threats had an effect. On October 2nd Irish voters reversed themselves and voted Yes by a thumping 67% to 33%. Supporters of the treaty now hope that it will come into force before the end of this year, unless opponents in the Czech Republic, including President Vaclav Klaus, scupper its ratification (see article).

On referendum day in the town of Swords near Dublin, early-morning commuters offered reasons for their vote. The recession loomed large. “I don't think we've got much of a choice,” said one woman, who was worried about jobs. A second woman who worked for Intel, an American maker of computer chips, said she had voted “Yes for investment”, and to be “seen to be part of Europe”. A young mother thought the Irish had voted the wrong way in 2008, so she would be voting Yes—though it did not feel very democratic, she added, that the country had been told to “vote again and get it right”, like “a scolded child”.

The No camp came up with its own partisan distortions, much as it did last time. A Catholic conservative group stuck up posters saying Ireland's minimum wage would fall to €1.84 ($2.70) an hour if Lisbon became law: a baseless claim. Left-wing groups played on long-standing Irish fears about military neutrality, suggesting Lisbon might pave the way for conscription into a Euro-army. That untruth worked too: at a polling station near O'Connell Street in Dublin, a young man said he had voted No “because they're sending the kids to war and all that.”

To be fair, one striking difference between the first and second Irish referendums was the level of knowledge displayed by Irish voters about the treaty. In 2008 they complained, with justice, that their elected political leaders had done a wretched job of explaining what Lisbon was for. This time, several voters said they supported Lisbon because it “streamlined” and “simplified” the way decisions are taken in the EU, which needed to “work better” after enlarging to 27 members.

The workings of the EU remain mysterious even to an informed Irishman. The European Commission, a souped-up civil service, has the sole right to propose legislation. Laws are then adopted by the Council of Ministers, representing national governments. In most cases they also need to be approved by the European Parliament—hence the Brussels jargon of “co-decision”. Legal disputes are settled by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

A central justification for the Lisbon treaty is that Europe has been all but paralysed by enlargement to 27 countries, because unanimity too often remains the rule in the council. This has been picked up by cheerleaders in the Brussels press pack and think-tank world. Hence their loud support for Lisbon, under which majority voting becomes the rule in 50 policy areas now decided by unanimity: most dramatically in migration, criminal justice and judicial and police co-operation, for which the ECJ gains oversight for the first time.

Yet the Euro-establishment's delight in lots more majority voting is just as nonsensical and self-serving as most of the Yes and No arguments. If enlargement had really gummed up the works of the EU, you would expect to see a large number of vital dossiers blocked by unanimity. Such a logjam does not exist. In recent times some huge bits of business, from a package of binding climate-change targets to a mammoth bit of legislation on chemicals safety registration, have been approved under today's pre-Lisbon rules. The EU has coped with a war on its doorstep (in Georgia), two gas crises in Ukraine and the global financial crash, and in each case the quality of its response has had more to do with political will among national leaders than the vagaries of voting rules. Various pointy-headed studies have analysed thousands of bits of legislation, and found the EU adopting new rules and regulations faster (25% faster, said one French study) since welcoming a dozen mostly ex-communist countries to the club.

The joy of majority voting

Something other than pure efficiency, then, must explain the enthusiasm of Lisbon supporters for the treaty. Some big things stand out. The first involves that move to majority voting. Praising this as “efficient” or “streamlined” is a euphemism, not to mention slightly creepy (a lynch-mob makes streamlined decisions, but nobody wants to copy that). Supporters of deeper political and economic integration like majority voting because it makes it harder for less enthusiastic countries to dissent, or to slow legislation down. This is not because the EU is about to start holding late-night cliffhanger votes. The shift from unanimity to majority voting is a big political change.

The EU may be a multinational body bound together by laws and treaties. But, in reality, politics trumps legal niceties when member nations negotiate among themselves in the council. The No camp in Ireland talked of Ireland losing “voting weight” under Lisbon, which tweaks the allocation of votes wielded by each country to match population size more closely (this is of most interest to Germany, which has too few votes under current rules). But such complaints miss the point. The council, where national governments meet, rarely holds votes, preferring to work towards consensus. Even so, when countries hold a veto, they can sit out negotiations; when, on the other hand, they know they could theoretically be outvoted, they enter the room in a state of fear, knowing they could end up isolated. This tends to push everyone towards compromise, and “more Europe”.

This is linked to the second big thing that supporters praise about Lisbon: a substantial increase in the number of policy areas where the European Parliament has an equal (or nearly equal) say to the council through co-decision. If Lisbon comes into force, the parliament will be the equal of the council in almost all EU legislation, gaining new rights over, for example, farm subsidies, fisheries, asylum and immigration. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will also have more say over the EU budget, bowing to national governments in only a handful of areas such as tax and foreign policy.

Nobody is sure how the move to majority voting will combine with co-decision for the parliament. But the prospect makes MEPs very excited, and everyone else rather nervous. The European Parliament is the “big failure” of the European project, says one senior EU official. “It is quite successful as an institution, but doesn't do what a parliament is supposed to do, which is to connect the people to the EU.”

A senior commission official accuses MEPs of living in a federalist fantasy, in which they are the parliament of a “unitary state” that is the equal of the 27 national governments of the EU. In fact, national voters barely know who MEPs are, and turnout in European elections has fallen in every direct election. There is also a structural difficulty: national governments still inhabit worlds of partisan party politics. The prevailing Zeitgeist at the European Parliament is one of post-partisan consensus and a sort of soggy corporatism. MEPs from centre-left, centre-right and the centre reliably favour action at the European level, a bigger EU budget, more public spending, more EU regulation and generally grabbing power from national governments and the commission.

Small states are ready to give a lot of decision-making power to the EU, a senior commission official says of the Lisbon treaty, but they are not willing “to take orders from the European Parliament”. Therefore, thanks to co-decision, trouble looms. An ambassador (from a pro-European country) says the combination of majority voting and co-decision could be a “very dangerous process”. The tradition in the EU, he notes, is that member governments never gang up on another country and isolate them on a point that touches their fundamental interests. The parliament is less squeamish. For example, most EU governments would think twice about imposing regulations on the City of London over ferocious British opposition, knowing that it might be their turn to defend precious national interests next time. Many MEPs would be only too happy to do that. On many dossiers, the pace of law-making could easily advance “very fast”, says the ambassador. That will lead to some miffed national governments.

Assuming that is right, expect to see a big increase in appeals to the one bit of the European machine where unanimity will remain the rule: the European Council, which gathers together the 27 national leaders of the EU. Under Lisbon the European Council is to gain a semi-permanent president, to replace the system of rotating presidencies. It is this new job of president of the council that is thought to interest Tony Blair, Britain's former prime minister (see article).

The Lisbon treaty is a bit hazy about what the president is to do, beyond organising summit meetings of the European Council and representing the EU in meetings with world leaders. One of his unexplored functions, suggests the Brussels-based ambassador, is to act as gatekeeper for countries unhappy with a decision made under majority rules, who wish to kick the dossier up to the more consensual European Council. In other words, the president, who for the first time will be a permanent presence in Brussels, may become a standing dispenser of national vetoes. Or then again, he may not.

To a proto-state and back again

Much of Lisbon remains mysterious, and that mystery has much to do with its history. It was born from a worthy initiative, the 2001 Laeken declaration, which called on the EU to become “more democratic, transparent and effective”, with the help of simplified legal underpinnings. Alas, this process was hijacked and transformed into a grandiose Constitutional Convention. This in turn led to a “constitutional treaty”, laden with the trappings of a proto-state, such as an article declaring Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” the EU anthem, and including a sweeping charter of fundamental rights. France and Britain pushed for the abolition of rotating presidencies, because in their view small countries ran them badly, and floated the idea of a full-time president to chair summits. To France's and Britain's dismay, Germany wanted an EU foreign minister, with a diplomatic service, who would represent national governments but also serve as a member of the European Commission.

This being the EU, the competing visions were combined in one stitch-up. The president of the council was created, but rotating presidencies were preserved anyway for most ministerial councils. The foreign minister was created, with a seat on the commission and chairmanship of the council that gathers foreign ministers, but the president of the council was also given a foreign-policy role. How all of that is supposed to fit together is exercising many of the sharpest minds in Brussels just now.

The constitution's grandeur alarmed voters sufficiently that in 2005 it was killed off by referendums in France and the Netherlands. In 2007 it was chopped up and repackaged as the Lisbon treaty, shorn of fancy bits like the anthem. The EU foreign minister was snappily renamed the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to calm British fears, and a prominent reference to “free and undistorted competition” was deleted at the demand of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. The stated idea was to create an ordinary “amending treaty” that could be bundled through national parliaments, without any more pesky voting by European citizens. Mr Blair helped that process along: in almost his last act in office he secured a handful of extra concessions tailored to allow him to say that his government was no longer bound by a promise to put the treaty to a referendum.

Britain has also secured an exemption, or thinks it has, from the charter of fundamental rights. The charter is given legal force by Lisbon. It is full of things like the right to strike and a “right of access to preventive health care” that sound potentially very expensive, but are not in the EU's gift to give: the union has few powers over things like industrial disputes or national health services. How such circles are squared will be up to the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest court.

In Brussels, diplomats and Eurocrats are most excited by the creation of the high representative for foreign policy, whose job merges two existing posts. One, that of EU external-relations commissioner, doles out billions of euros in aid to places like Palestine, runs a network of foreign-representative offices and oversees talks on partnership agreements with other countries. It is held by Benita Ferrero-Waldner, an Austrian. The other post, held by Javier Solana, a Spaniard, is that of foreign-policy envoy of the 27 EU countries. Mr Solana is Europe's point man on dossiers as thorny as Iran or the Middle East, but the biggest countries will not let him speak for them: during the French presidency, last year, he was virtually kept in a box for six months. Lisbon removes the distinction between the Solana and Ferrero-Waldner empires, which should at least eliminate rivalry and duplication.

The new holder will have a job that is both powerful and impossible. It may involve 150 major meetings a year, both in the EU and outside it. The holder will also speak for the EU at the United Nations, when governments have agreed on a foreign-policy position (unanimity remains the rule in foreign policy). Then there is the work of running a diplomatic service and spending hours on the telephone to world leaders. The job may require deputies with real clout: Lisbon is silent on this point. Under the treaty, the keenest member countries may push ahead with defence co-operation among themselves. This alarms many in Britain, a country seen as indispensable to the construction of a serious European defence force.

An antidote to selfishness?

In the short run, Lisbon will throw up almost as many problems as it is supposed to solve. It may take 20 years to digest the changes it brings to EU foreign policy, says one senior official. Even then, it is likely to help most in places where Europe already has clout, either because it is a big donor (as in Africa), or because the countries in question, such as the Balkans, long to join the EU. The big EU states will go on running their own foreign policies. The president of the council may become a mere summit-chair, or the global face of Europe: it depends who is appointed to the post. In turn, who is appointed will say much about the EU's ambitions in the world.

Extra power for the European Parliament will combine with majority voting to make it harder for dissenting countries to restrain others. Federalists are convinced this will speed up European integration. Sceptics look at today's Europe, and the growing trends towards national selfishness even in once-model pupils like Germany, and wonder whether Lisbon is out of step with today's political realities before it is even enacted.

Finally, Lisbon contains some wholly untested invitations for national parliaments and citizens to involve themselves in the running of the union. A million ordinary citizens from a “significant” number of countries will be allowed to ask the European Commission to come up with an idea for EU action in a certain field. National parliaments will also be allowed to protest if they think a proposed EU law unnecessary. If half the 27 national parliaments are unhappy, and a majority of national governments (or a majority of MEPs) agree, then the measure must be scrapped: a tall order.

Europe is an experiment, and frequently frustrating, says one senior official. In its defence it is, he argues, “the best functioning organisation in the world that attempts to deal with the fact that politics is local, and economics global.” Lisbon is a highly flawed attempt to help Europe bridge that gap. It had better work, because there is no appetite for a new treaty, nor will there be for many years to come.