US Time Magazine on Ireland & Nice Treaty

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday October 17, 2002 00:54 by US Spin

FYI: it's the American TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2002/1021/eu/story.html

Tomas Jirsa, a confident, gum-chewing 19-year-old from Prague, is standing on Kildare Street in Dublin, handing out leaflets and wearing a bright red vest that proclaims: I'm from the Czech Republic and against nice — ask me why. Nice is shorthand for the European Union enlargement treaty the Irish government dearly wants voters to ratify this Saturday. (They already rejected it once, last year, thanks to a swirl of conflicting emotions: fear that it would undercut Irish neutrality and sovereignty; an urge to give a bloody nose to the government of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.) If the Irish vote yes this time, 10 new countries, including the Czech Republic, will join the E.U. in little more than a year — a momentous result that the European Commission last week proudly confirmed was still on track. But if they vote no, the treaty will collapse and the historic process of extending the Union to encompass countries once locked behind the Iron Curtain will be knocked sideways, if not into reverse.

So why is Jirsa rooting for the deal to die? "I'm totally pro-European!" he says. But he has read the fine print of the Nice Treaty and doesn't like the terms — this young man from a former communist country thinks they're undemocratic. "It changes the whole European scheme in favor of the big nations," he argues. Countries will lose their veto rights on some issues; a cozy club of longtime members will be permitted to cook up cooperation schemes that exclude newcomers; no longer will each nation be perpetually guaranteed a commissioner in Brussels. "The current arrangements are working well enough. I want to be part of Europe, but the old Europe," he insists, before walking down a quiet street (only a few people have bothered to ask him about Nice, as it turns out, and most of them are reporters). He boards an open-topped double-decker bus full of like-minded activists from Estonia, Finland, Denmark and Slovenia — a sign on the side calls it the speak-up-for-small-nations democracy tour. Until Saturday's vote, the tour will be zooming around Ireland — which happens to be the biggest net beneficiary of E.U. subsidies — trying to convince its voters to make the E.U. harder for other small nations to join.