UNION TREATY : Europe Holds Its Breath as France Prepares to Vote on Unity

The European Community’s far-reaching treaty on political and economic union, which Danish voters narrowly rejected in June, is growing increasingly unpopular throughout the 12-nation EC.

France, which with Germany is one of the EC’s original twin pillars, could effectively bury the treaty in a Sept. 20 referendum that, according to the polls, could go either way.

And even if French voters ratify the treaty, mounting opposition elsewhere will make its goals--including a common EC currency and mechanisms for setting joint European foreign and security policy--difficult to achieve in practice.

France is the last EC country to conduct a referendum on the treaty, which has been ratified by voters in Ireland and parliaments in Greece and Luxembourg. Elsewhere, national parliaments hold the power, and all are expected to ratify if the French vote “yes.”

But if voters had the chance, they might well turn thumbs down in Germany and Britain.

Germans are alarmed over the prospect of abandoning the deutschemark, Europe’s strongest currency and a symbol of Germany’s postwar economic success, in favor of a currency that they might have to share with such economic emergency-room cases as Italy.

And the insular British worry that the treaty would give the EC’s bureaucrats license, as their foreign secretary once charged, to meddle in “the nooks and crannies” of British affairs.

To Martin Bangemann, the ranking German official at the EC Commission, the growing doubts about the treaty reveal the danger of popular referendums. “People are using arguments without knowing” what the treaty would do, he told reporters recently at the EC Commission’s Brussels headquarters.

Others draw the opposite conclusion. Voter skepticism, they argue, demonstrates that Europe’s leaders forgot to marshal public opinion behind them when they initialed the treaty behind closed doors last December in the Dutch town of Maastricht.

“The trouble is the arrogance of our leaders in believing that the public doesn’t need to know what the treaty says and couldn’t understand anyway,” said Stanley Crossick, chairman of the Belmont European Policy Center. “We need to be more democratic, something you Americans understand.”

Throughout the EC, Europeans are sounding alarms that the Maastricht treaty, by shifting more authority from national capitals to Brussels, would erode national identities.

It is a charge the treaty supporters such as British Prime Minister John Major dismiss as a “phantom.” In a speech Monday, Major said, “Whatever happens in the Community, the French will be no less French, the Germans no less German, the Danes no less Danish and, I promise you, the British no less British.”

Also working against the treaty are anemic national economies. After booming since the mid-1980s, the EC predicts overall economic growth of only 1.25% this year and 1.5% next year, with unemployment rising from 9.7% now to 10%. Voters are typically less likely to endorse the sorts of changes envisaged by the Maastricht treaty when they feel their own welfare is insecure.

What’s more, the EC’s inability to stop the bloodshed on its doorstep in the Yugoslav crisis has made Europeans wonder whether the EC is ready for the common foreign policy-making mechanisms that the Maastricht treaty would establish.

In an EC-wide survey conducted in June, London’s Market & Opinion Research International found substantial dissatisfaction with key elements of the treaty.

A majority of respondents in Britain and Germany opposed abandoning the British pound and the German mark in favor of a common European currency. The treaty establishes a common currency no later than 1999 for nations with low inflation and manageable budget deficits, although the British Parliament retains the right to reject the common currency.

Likewise, more respondents in half of the 12 EC countries--France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg--said the treaty would make them personally worse off than better off. This reflects the EC policy, which would be accelerated by the Maastricht treaty, of transferring funds from the richer nations to Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland.

Doubts about the treaty probably matter most in Germany, the EC’s biggest member and its economic powerhouse. In Germany, the future of the deutschemark is the overriding issue.

“The people are very proud of this symbol of national strength and postwar achievement,” said Jochen Hansen, a researcher with Germany’s Allensbach Institute. “They can’t understand why they should give up their currency in the absence of an urgent need.”

Hansen said he thought Germans would probably turn down the Maastricht treaty, if--as is impossible under the German constitution--they had a chance to vote on ratifying it. Recent Allensbach public opinion surveys bolster this view.

By 41% to 25%, Germans said in June that the government should have rejected the treaty’s provision for a common European currency. By 34% to 26%, they expressed satisfaction that Danish voters had refused to ratify.

And last January, a month after Chancellor Helmut Kohl initialed the Maastricht treaty, fully 39% of Germans said they feared a gradual loss of German identity in a homogeneous Europe. Fifteen months earlier, in October, 1990, only 21% had expressed such a concern.

Britain is the other EC powerhouse where public sentiment toward the Maastricht treaty is, at best, uncertain. A Gallup Poll in June found the public almost evenly split, with 38% saying they would vote for the treaty and 35% saying they would vote “no.” A majority, 51%, said European integration was proceeding too quickly, against 25% who said the pace was right and 14% who called it too slow.

Prime Minister Major, who pulled the treaty back from Parliament pending the outcome of the French referendum, admitted Monday that the treaty probably faces a “bruising passage.” But he rejected calls for a referendum, arguing that many voters would probably base their decisions on matters unrelated to the treaty.

Meanwhile, in tiny Denmark, where the treaty’s troubles began, sentiment against it seems to be hardening. Recent polls show that the treaty’s opponents--a bare 50.7% of those who voted in the June 2 referendum--have grown to as much as 57%.

That puts the Danish government on the spot. Under EC rules, the treaty cannot take effect until it is ratified by all 12 member nations.

If Denmark will not accept the treaty as negotiated last December, either the treaty will have to be changed--which would require a complicated renegotiation followed by another round of ratification votes in all EC countries--or Denmark will have to finesse its voters’ opposition.

The Danish government plans to analyze its options in a “white paper” to be completed shortly after the French referendum. Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlueter last weekend held out the possibility of a second referendum on a new, abbreviated relationship of Denmark with the EC.

Europe’s Bid to Band Together

Many polls find superficial support for the European Community Treaty on European Union, the agreement more commonly known as the Maastricht treaty. But when asked the more probing question--Would your nation be better or worse off if the treaty were approved?--Europe’s deep divisions on Maastricht grow clearer. This map, based on sentiments of a preponderance of those responding to a recent poll, shows countries where residents feel they would be better off (black shading) and worse off (white shading) if the Maastricht Treaty takes effect.

Belgium: black

Denmark: white

France: white

Germany: white

Britain: white

Greece: black

Ireland: black

Italy: black

Luxembourg: white

Netherlands: white

Portugal: black

Spain: black

What Treaty Would Do

* Require 11 of the 12 EC countries (and Britain, if Parliament so chooses) to scrap their national currencies in favor of a common currency in 1999, if their inflation rate, budget deficit and national debt are sufficiently low.

* Establish a European Central Bank to set EC-wide monetary policy.

* Create mechanisms to let the 12 EC nations set common foreign and security policies.

* Provide for joint defense planning by the EC nations and open the ultimate possibility of a joint defense.

* Call on all EC members but Britain to adopt common “social policies”--government benefit levels and rules governing working conditions.

* Establish EC citizenship and allow EC citizens, regardless of their nationality, the right to vote in local elections where they live.

Source: Market & Opinion Research International, London