Madam President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, President of the Commission, it is too soon for any exhaustive analysis of the Irish ‘no’ to the Treaty of Nice. Yet it is possible to make a few comments on it without too much risk of being mistaken. The first concerns the official reactions to this bombshell, which took all the leading European figures by surprise. In Luxembourg this Monday, the ministers apparently devoted half an hour or so to this event, which one of them described as merely a hiccup. That is what I would call burying one’s head in the sand. Surely the minister must realise that this rejection represents a new and serious symptom of the crisis that is profoundly undermining European integration. Nearly three quarters of the Irish population said ‘yes’ to the Community when their country joined in 1972 and today the same proportion is refusing to say ‘yes’ to the EU Treaty of Nice – yet the national and European leaders did not even see it coming. We are facing a problem that looms far larger than Nice and Ireland. There were other warnings of the Irish ‘no’, in particular the growing rate of abstention in nearly all the EU countries at the European elections. In my view, and this is my second comment, that ‘no’ vote is first and foremost the price of building Europe without the citizens and at a distance from them. Where are the wide-ranging public and pluralist debates, at which everyone lays their cards on the table, on the issues at stake, the difficulties to be overcome, the values to be upheld and, finally, on the political choices that need to be made completely transparently and democratically? There is one example that has a direct bearing on what happened in Ireland. At the summit, the states concocted, at breakneck speed, a defence Europe with imprecisely defined missions and which public opinion, in general, regards as unlikely to be independent. They often glorified this new achievement in tones that the neutral countries in particular, although others too, perceived as militaristic. So this backlash is hardly surprising. The same applies in other areas, especially the economic and social area. What are we to think of those leaders of the richest countries who nonchalantly cultivate the net contributor syndrome and raise the spectre of the renationalisation of agricultural aid and the Structural Funds, thereby fuelling the pernicious ‘each for himself’ trend? At the same time, the federalist overstatement of the ongoing institutional debate has played its part in creating confusion in countries that want to protect their place, their role and their identity in a future large complex of which they can perceive neither the nature nor the contours. Added to that, there is the less than engaging spectacle that the Fifteen offered the public in Nice, so that it is not surprising to find a general feeling of disenchantment if not the return of a populist and inward-looking trend. That brings me to my third and final comment on a question everyone is asking: what should we do now? First, in my view, we must respect the rules of democracy. Whether we like it or not, the Treaty has not been ratified unanimously and we will have to make some improvements to it. Next, this time we would do well to hold an in-depth debate with the citizens of all our countries on the kind of Europe to build and on the political, institutional and financial implications of our decisions. Lastly, we must not let our opponents, who are ashamed of enlargement, use this crisis as a pretext to defer to an unknown date this pan-European project that is potentially great and splendid, but is obviously also complex and costly. Here too, we need a responsible debate so that we can evaluate, in the clear light of day, the conditions under which we can all succeed. Just as there can be no ambition without effort, there can be no European project without solidarity.

Political group: GUE-NGL