Europe Treaty Gets Big Boost in Irish Vote

Two weeks after being derailed in Denmark, European economic and political union was put back on the tracks Friday as Irish voters handily approved a treaty giving Western Europe a single currency and common foreign and defense policies.

Complete but unofficial results from Thursday’s referendum showed 69% of those voting favored the treaty, which was negotiated by European Community leaders last December in the Dutch town of Maastricht.

Ireland, the second of the 12 European Community members to hold a referendum on the treaty, became the first to approve it. In Denmark, the vote against ratification June 2 was a razor-thin 50.7% to 49.3%.

Only France still plans a referendum, probably this fall, and polls show a plurality in favor of ratification. The French Parliament is separately amending the constitution to conform to the European union treaty, a process that took a major step forward Friday when the National Assembly, one of the two legislative houses, voted overwhelmingly in favor.

The other nine EC countries have left ratification up to their parliaments, and approval is expected in all nine later this year, even though public doubts are growing in Germany and elsewhere.

“I believe the treaty will be ratified in all the other 10 countries now that Ireland has given a very strong lead,” a jubilant Irish Foreign Minister David Andrews said in Dublin. “The ratification process is still very much on the rails.”

In Ireland, all four major political parties supported ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, with Prime Minister Albert Reynolds emphasizing its economic implications. Ireland already receives aid of about $2.5 billion a year--the equivalent of 7% of its economic production--from the EC, and Reynolds said the treaty would bring in an additional $2 billion a year.

In opposition was a rainbow of groups, including the Green Party, defenders of Ireland’s traditional neutrality and extremists on both ends of the country’s explosive abortion debate.

“Europe was at a crossroads,” Reynolds said after the vote. “If Ireland had voted no, it would have been the end to integration.”

Nowhere was the Irish vote more welcome than in the EC’s Brussels headquarters. Jacques Delors, president of the EC’s policy-formulating Commission, who had taken much of the blame for the Maastricht Treaty’s defeat in Denmark, issued a statement praising the result.

By itself, however, the outcome in Ireland did nothing to bring down the legal obstacles that Denmark’s “no” vote places in the way of ratifying the Maastricht Treaty. EC treaties take force only when ratified by all 12 member nations; 11 out of 12 is not enough.

EC foreign ministers, in a strategy expected to be endorsed by heads of government at the semiannual EC summit next week, have ruled out rewriting the treaty, a procedure that would require starting the ratification process afresh in the other 11 nations.

Instead, they hope the other 11 will give ringing endorsements to the Maastricht Treaty by the end of the year. “We hope the Irish ‘yes’ will be the first of a series,” said Joao de Deus Pinheiro, Portugal’s foreign minister.

Danish political leaders, who wholeheartedly support the treaty, could then try to find a way to give voters a second chance at ratification, with the clear implication that refusal would leave Denmark isolated from an increasingly unified Western Europe.

A poll published Friday in the British newspaper The European suggests one potential difficulty for this second-chance vote. By 44% to 41%, Danish voters say they would again turn down the treaty if it were presented to them unchanged. If it were changed in some unspecified way, however, 44% say they could vote for it and 39% are unsure, against only 17% who say they would still vote “no.”

If Denmark still rejected the treaty, most analysts believe the 11 other EC members would find a way to form their deep economic and political union on their own, leaving Denmark to participate only in EC programs already in place.

“If the 11 go ahead and ratify, they won’t let themselves be held back by the Danes,” said Stanley Crossick, chairman of the Belmont European Policy Center in Brussels.

Outside Denmark, the poll in The European showed pluralities in the other 11 EC countries in favor of the treaty, although the tally was a tight 35% to 30% in Britain. In France, the margin of approval was about 40% to 20%, but two voters in five remained undecided.