№216. From Lisbon to Deauville, Practicalities of the Lisbon treaty revision(s) - Kaczyński, Piotr Maciej; ó Broin, Peadar (CEPS Centre for European Policy Studies, 2010)
It has only been one year since the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force and already there is a stack of pending issues requiring primary law change in the EU. The Franco-German Deauville Declaration of 18 October 2010 is probably the most politically prominent of them all, yet it is not the first, nor will it be the last in a long, incremental process of constant treaty revision similar to the national process of amending national constitutions. All of these proposals have one feature in common: none of them is an overarching treaty change and each one is designed in such a way that amends only one element of the system. This, in theory, should avoid the need to submit the change to public referenda in the EU as part of the ratification process. This paper explores the political difficulties of treaty reform in the context of five pending revisions. It first looks at the Deauville Declaration and its translation into political and legal reality. The second part is dedicated to the four other treaty revisions on the European agenda. Finally, it focuses on some of the potential problems in the ratification phase