After 8 years, EU reform comes into force

BRUSSELS - After eight years of rows and soul-searching, the European Union finally managed to reform itself Tuesday as the Lisbon Treaty entered into force.

The treaty is meant to make the bloc more transparent and efficient at home and give it greater clout abroad, but it has proved deeply unpopular with EU voters, with opponents portraying it as an attempt to create a “super-state”.

“The treaty of Lisbon puts citizens at the centre of the European project. I’m delighted that we now have the right institutions to act and a period of stability, so that we can focus all our energy on delivering what matters to our citizens,” the head of the EU’s executive, Jose Manuel Barroso, said in a statement.

The treaty re-writes the EU’s basic rules, first enshrined in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, to answer some of the criticisms of its member states and their citizens.

In a bid to give the bloc more influence over world events, it creates the posts of president and foreign-policy director of the council of EU member states - the closest the bloc has yet had to a prime minister and foreign minister.

EU leaders chose Belgium’s former premier Herman Van Rompuy as president at a summit Nov 19. They were expected to formalise that appointment later Tuesday, with the 62-year-old set to take up office Jan 1.

They simultaneously named Britain’s Baroness Catherine Ashton as their choice to be the EU’s foreign-policy director and vice-president of the European Commission.

Ashton was to take up her duties Tuesday, but as with other members of the commission, she will have to be approved in her post by the European Parliament.

Analysts say that the hearing, expected in January, could be a bruising one, as has Ashton served just one year as the EU’s trade commissioner and has no other foreign or security policy experience.

By contrast, her predecessor, Javier Solana, who spent 10 years as the EU’s less prestigious and powerful foreign-policy coordinator, had served as Spain’s foreign minister and NATO secretary general before taking up the post of EU high representative.

The treaty also tries to make the EU more transparent and democratic by handing power over a swathe of policies in the field of justice and security to the European Parliament. Formerly, joint EU rules in such areas had been agreed by national governments.

It also insists that national parliaments should be consulted on major issues - the first time that they have been formally brought into the EU decision-making process.

And it allows normal citizens to call for new EU laws if they can gather one million signatures in a “significant number” of EU states.

Member states have been arguing over their shared rules ever since December 2001, when it became clear that the then-15-member bloc was set to take in more states. It currently has 27, with several more queueing up to join.

National experts initially drew up a grandiose constitution for the EU, but French and Dutch voters rejected it in referenda in 2005.

EU politicians then proposed a mini-treaty to preserve the essentials of the constitution. National leaders approved it at a late-night summit in Lisbon in October 2007.

However, Irish voters rejected it in a referendum in June 2008, leading to a spate of top-level meetings before they could be persuaded to accept it in a repeat vote in October this year.