Germany Urges Kicking Poland To The Curb
Germany is, quite literally, urging the others members of the European Union to simply ignore Poland and go ahead with negotiating a treaty to replace the failed EU constitution. This is not an unprecedented move, incidentally. The EU did it once before to Britain over Margaret Thatcher's objections.
BRUSSELS (AFP) - Germany urged its European Union partners to move ahead on a new treaty of reforms without Poland, after Warsaw rejected an offer to modify the bloc's voting system in its favour.
After a series of unsuccessful face-to-face talks with Polish President Lech Kaczynski, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to press on with plans for ending the EU's two-year political malaise and replace its failed constitution.
"The German chancellor wants to take a decision at the summit without Poland," her spokesman, Ulrich Wilhelm, told reporters, setting up a marathon summit in Brussels.
"The German presidency now wants to obtain a joint mandate of the 26 other countries for an Inter-Governmental Conference," he said, referring to a series of meetings originally set to start next month to finalize the "reform treaty".
Under EU rules, only a simple majority of the 27 countries is needed to call such a conference, and this has happened in 1985, despite the objections of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
However decisions at the conference would have to be taken at unanimity.
"Poland would then have the chance to join the European consensus at the governmental conference in the autumn," Wilhelm said.
After the announcement, an EU diplomat warned that "nothing has been decided yet. Everything could change over dinner" among the leaders.
Poland is not trying to get rules that favor it, however, contrary to the wording of the AFP story. They are trying to get rules which do not favor Germany and France. There is a difference, and the Germans and the French obviously do not want to give up their dominance. (Earlier posts here and here.)
World news | Gaius Friday, 22 June , 2007
By Chris, Saturday, 23 June , 2007 @ 5:22 am
This whole process has been a window into the way that transnational elitists view their role in modern statecraft. They dictate, the people object, they dictate some more, the people object, they bypass their own procedures and end up where they wanted to be.
Our local school board did this to us when they wanted to build three (now two) large elementary schools on the periphery of town to replace the old neighborhood schools. Their proposal (which, in fairness, they worked hard on and undoubtedly believed to be in the best interests of the community) lost at the polls three times, never coming close to passing. They invoked an obscure regulation that allowed them to claim that the current schools were life-threatening in their “decay”, and did what they wanted to do in the first place. And they could have paid cash for both schools they built, but they took the money for one of them from the taxpayers anyway, because that would have depleted their surplus.