How the EU is breaking its own Lisbon Treaty

That the European Union takes to the moral high ground on international law when it suits it is hardly new. Nor is its infringement of international treaties, even when they are its own. For six months now, the European Union has been in breach of its fundamental international treaty: the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. 

Brussels has fallen foul of Article 341 and Protocol 6 – or what might be called the ‘Alsace-Lorraine protocol’ – of what is officially known as the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). This section of the treaty permanently situates the European Parliament’s plenary seat in the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg. But since March 2020, the European Union has moved the Parliament to Brussels against the wishes of France. Why is this important? Other than being a violation of an international treaty that can only be modified by member states unanimously, it is further evidence of the European Union riding roughshod over highly sensitive issues connected to Europe’s troubled history.

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Gus Carter

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After three wars in seventy years, Franco-German reconciliation is at the heart of the EU project. And nowhere is that better epitomised than with Alsace-Lorraine. The French provinces were annexed by Germany in the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt, returned to France by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, taken back by Germany following occupation in 1940 and returned to France after the Second World War. 

The Alsace-Lorraine question – as it used to be known – has evoked for 150 years a complexity and sensitivity matched only by the Northern Ireland question. Consequently, from the beginnings of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, the Alsatian city of Strasbourg became one of the European communities’ three capitals (with Luxembourg and Brussels), as an enduring symbol of Franco-German reconciliation.