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OCR Government and Politics: Unit F854 Political ideas and concepts

Has Lisbon changed anything in the EU?

The Lisbon Treaty was a response to the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by French and Dutch voters in 2005. David Phinnemore reviews the changes introduced by Lisbon and asks if it is merely a repackaged version of the Constitutional Treaty.

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On 1 December 2009 the Treaty of Lisbon came into force. As with previous treaties aimed at reforming the European Union (EU), Lisbon attracted conflicting assessments of its significance. For Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, it was ‘a rotten treaty…a smokescreen for the accretion of establishment power’. The Daily Telegraph concurred: ‘more of Britain’s powers surrendered to Brussels’, it claimed. The Sun’s headline screamed: ‘Britain betrayed as hated EU treaty becomes law.’

The treaty’s supporters were more laid back. Timothy Garton Ash, in the Guardian, expressed his delight at the treaty’s entry into force, adding that the new treaty was no ‘great leap forward’, nor did it create ‘the federal superstate of eurosceptic nightmare’. For Manuel José Barroso, President of European Commission, Lisbon was providing the EU with ‘the right institutions to act and a period of stability’ so that the EU could ‘focus all [its] energies on delivering what matters to our citizens’.

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OCR Government and Politics: Unit F854 Political ideas and concepts

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