Despite griping about the Irish 2009 Lisbon referendum and inciting President Vaclav Klaus and UK Conservative leader David Cameron to resistance against the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, and despite the absence of a federal master plan among current European leaders, Declan Ganley has one lucid passage in his op-ed article “Stuck with the Lisbon Treaty and its anti-democratic formula” (Wall Street Journal, 27 October 2009):
“Be honest and lay the federal map on the table. Get the support, legitimacy and mandate of the people openly, because they will support it if it's done properly. Show them it will be fair and just and proper; show them that they are and will be ultimately in charge, and that Europe will be accountable to them. Inspire them if you're capable; I dare you.”
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In a changing world, the safety and prosperity of EU citizens will require more Europe than on offer under the Lisbon Treaty, the modest result of a decade of efforts.
Ganley’s strategic miss was to squander millions trying to wreck the inadequate Lisbon Treaty reforms, without even presenting a clear alternative blueprint, and with no better reform on offer at this stage.
Europe needs a real foreign and security policy, a common defence, a federal budget and a justice system, enshrined in a real basic law, based on the consent of the governed.
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Is a new day dawning for Declan Ganley and citizens of the European Union?
Ralf Grahn
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
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It has always been the so-called sceptics who have had the best interests of the people of the whole European Continent at their heart.
ReplyDeleteThose wedded to the institutions of the present non-democratic EU are the real danger to the freedoms, liberty and future prosperity of the people of the Continent.
Read your own words about those trying to promote the odious Tony Blair as the first post-Lisbon EU Council President to see where the present EU is headed.
Consider the disgusting lies and the underhand power transfer by which the Lisbon Treaty is being imposed upon the people of Britain.
Then realize that any Federal map as proffered by Mr Ganley, even one accountable to the voters, daily becomes an ever more remote possibility while the doors to the halls of power remain significantly closed - as on the deliberations at the upcoming EU Council meeting.
Mr Cole,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, Declan Ganley's Libertas did not present a federal and democratic vision of Europe, but a nationalistic critique of the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty. Ganley recruited nationalists, some with less than savoury backgrounds. The same can be said for his engagement in the two Irish Lisbon referendums.
If he has now come around to a democratic and federal view of Europe's future, I am pleased.
I see the Lisbon Treaty differently from you.
It does bring some improvements, mainly through the enhanced role of the European Parliament in legislation, as well as the High Representative and the European External Action Service in foreign policy.
As the result of a decade long treaty reform process, it is disappointing, as is our current national leaders' rejection of the vision of a democratic European Union.
However, where you seem to reject the existing EU totally, I see its weaknesses and the modest reforms more in the light of the slowly evolving parliamentary democracy in Britain, a long and arduous process.