The Treaty of Lisbon and Development Trends in the European Union

The entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon is a good occasion to examine the development trends in the European Union. The document takes a more pragmatic approach and is a rather technical improvement of the primary law of the EU. Under the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon, EU is actually an international organization with a more effective type of leadership. The decision-making system is improved and simplifi ed. This may help Europe to become a powerful actor in international relations and to more effectively solve the problems of development of the European continent. A crucial solution concerns providing a binding legal character to the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which makes the rights more visible as guiding values for all the UE policies. This opens the door for accession of EU to the European Convention on Human Rights. The Treaty of Lisbon is only a reform treaty, and several important changes, provided by the Constitutional Treaty, have survived. They include the provisions of the federal character (e. g. those concerning an " early warning system" in which national parliaments will scrutinize draft European legislative acts as to their compliance with the principle of subsidiarity). However, the Treaty does not create a federal state and does not even suggest that this idea would be realized. The rejection of the Constitutional Treaty, which has lead to a crisis within the EU, may show that the radical changes, proposed by the European elites, are not accepted or not understood by the European public opinion. The problem of " democratic defi cit" within EU (refl ected by the fact that the societies of the EU do not exert appropriate infl uence on the development and functioning of the Union) is still not solved, although the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon provide for the strengthening of the European Parliament and the national parliaments move in a positive direction. The cooperation between the European Parliament and national parliaments may be an important factor of creating the EU political legitimacy. The dialogue between the supporters of the idea of "Europe of Homelands" and of " Federal Europe" is continued. The concept of "Europe of Homelands" still has a big support, especially among the new member states of Central and Eastern Europe. In such a situation the federalization of EU cannot be carried out rapidly against the will of those communities.