When is Nicolas Sarkozy going to wake up and smell the café au lait? As recently as yesterday, he was crowing about his “victory” over David Cameron, claiming the British Prime Minister had behaved like a “kid” at last week’s EU summit. “No other country supported him, which is what you call a clear political defeat,” said the French President. “Objectively, it was a good coup. I manoeuvred well.”

There are still some die-hard Europhiles who agree with Sarkozy’s self-assessment. In a speech yesterday to the IPPR, a Labour think tank, the businessman Roland Rudd joked: “Sarkozy held a gun to Cameron’s head and Cameron pulled the trigger to spite him.”

But to those of us who live in the real world, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Sarkozy made a terrible blunder in railroading so many members of the EU into endorsing his and Angela Merkel’s “fiscal compact”. Even now, I find it hard to believe that as many as 21 of the other people in the room at last week’s summit actually supported Merkozy’s proposals. What were they thinking? It would have been one thing for the 17 eurozone countries – and, in due course, the six other members of the EU who endorsed the proposals – to permanently relinquish sovereignty over tax-and-spending. Perhaps that’s a necessary step in the creation of a United States of Europe (though you would have thought the French President and German Chancellor would have accompanied this with a proposal for a proper central bank capable of acting as a lender of last resort). But the Merkozy proposal went far beyond that. In addition, the leaders of Europe were being asked to commit their countries in perpetuity to a policy of fiscal consolidation. That is to say, the 17 + 6 signatories of this “treaty” were proposing to give up all democratic control over fiscal policy – not just via their own parliaments, but via the European parliament as well. Henceforth, fiscal policy within this “eurozone plus” region would be set in stone, with no possibility of changing it, regardless of the views of their respective populations. At a stroke, these 23 leaders were proposing to denude hundreds of millions of Europeans – the people they purportedly represent – of their democratic rights.

No wonder Sarkozy calls it a “coup”. What’s extraordinary is that the French President imagined this monstrous treaty would become the foundation stone of a new European settlement. He and Merkel sold the proposal to their European allies as the only way to save the euro, a hostage to fortune if ever there was one, because, of course, the moment it became clear that the “fiscal compact” would do nothing of the kind – and you didn’t need to be Nostradamus to predict that – it was obvious that the whole deal would collapse.

(Dr. Benny Peiser)