Referendum: answer Yes or No
Question 1: Are you in favour of referendums? Please answer either Yes or No.
Question 2: Are you in favour of referendums if you have good reason to expect the majority vote will not be the one you would wish? Again, please answer Yes or No.
Question 3: Do you think there are some questions that are just too complex to answer with a simple Yes or No? Please answer ... but you get the idea.
I've just been in Dublin, where yesterday they were being asked to vote in a referendum on the EU's Lisbon reform treaty. This is pretty much the same document as the one we used to call the Constitutional Treaty, but French and Dutch voters put that one out of its misery, so now it's been reborn without its constitutional fripperies.
I was in France and the Netherlands, too, for their referendums three years ago, so I may be in danger of becoming an EU referendum expert. And the one thing I have learned is that when people vote in these exercises, they tend not to answer the precise question on the paper.
Whatever the actual wording, the question people prefer to answer is: Do you approve of what the government is up to? Or perhaps: Do you approve of what the EU is up to? Or even: Are you happy with things in general, all things considered, by and large?
And because most people have little difficulty in finding things to complain about, the Noes seem to have a built-in advantage. (I'm writing, of course, before the announcement of the Irish referendum result. Maybe the Irish will prove to be rather happier than their French and Dutch counterparts were in 2005.)
The best question I saw asked in Ireland was in the Irish Independent: "Why should I say Yes to a legal document I don't understand?"
So perhaps it would be useful for me to give you a taste of what the Lisbon Treaty actually says. It starts like this:
"1) The preamble shall be amended as follows:
(a) the following text shall be inserted as the second recital:
"DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of
Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and
inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law,";
(b) In the seventh, which shall become the eighth, recital, the words "of this Treaty" shall be replaced by "of this Treaty and of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,";
(c) In the eleventh, which shall become the twelfth, recital, the words "of this Treaty" shall be replaced by "of this Treaty and of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,".
I could go on, but I strongly suspect you'd rather I didn't. (There are 260 pages of it, and you can read every word here.) To be fair, the Irish foreign minister, Micheal Martin, did point out when I interviewed him that people don't necessarily read every word of the Finance Bill when it's presented every year - but that doesn't mean they're not in favour of their taxes going down.
But then they're not asked to approve it in a referendum either. It really isn't easy to persuade people to say Yes to something which reads like the very worst that lawyers could come up with.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~48~RS~)
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The Irish Republic voted down the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum yesterday. Of all the countries in the EU, Ireland was the only one to submit the treaty to a referendum. This is required by the Irish constitution. The Lisbon treaty is apparently a re-write of the EU constitutional treaty which was voted down by the French and Dutch people a few years ago. This time the leaders of the EU decided the treaty was too important to be left to a vote by the people. In other words, they decided to bypass the democratic vote and submit it for approval only by legislatures of the respective countries whom they could more easily control. So one of the smaller countries has saved the reputation of the EU parliamentary democracies for its supposed commitment to democratic procedures. Don't get me wrong. I live in the US which also prides itself in being a democracy. But sometimes the referendum process can go badly askew. In California, where I once lived, the referendum process called the initiative in which the voters are allowed to directly vote for propositions submitted through a petitionary campaign has become a nightmare. Voters are asked to make decisions directly bypassing the Legislature on an annual basis. But most initiatives are now submitted by deep pockets special interest groups who spend millions of dollars to distort the real purpose of their badly worded propositions. This is what happened several years ago when the voters approved an electricity deregulation proposition which allowed the "rape" of jacked up wholesale electric rates by the crooked multi-state provider based in Texas known as Enron. Enron has become the "poster child" for the increasingly corrupt business and corporate environment in the US.
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Can someone explain why any Westminster MP would want power (the goal of any political career) to drift to another centre-of-power? Whatever you think of Europe, I've never understood the logic of wanting MEPs to do stuff you used to have control over. Why are MPs happy to cede the thing they most want???
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Robin Lustig has done a good job of describing referenda in general and the Irish referendum in particular.
Pundits in general would be in deep trouble were they to try to define "democracy". It is said to be government for the benefit of the people, but where would one validly claim that it is "by the people"?
Initiative, referendum and recall may be criteria of popular democracy. In practice, only periodic change of rulers (delayed recall) seems to be anywhere applied.
Referenda concerning the EU suggest a failure of the governmental organization.
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Rather than answer yes or no, I'm going to rephrase the questions;
1. Are you in favor of people deciding for themselves what laws they will be governed by and who will make them?
2. If a constitution can be fashioned to limit the power of government to infringe on the rights of the minority, an individual being a minority of one, within those limits do you trust the will of the majority?
3. Are ordinary citizens too stupid to understand and make rational decisions regarding the way their lives are to be controlled and therefore should that power be put in the hands of an elite intelligencia instead?
3a. If you answered question 3 that a ruling elite should make all decisions for society, who should choose that elite?
The answers IMO strongly depend on which side of the pond you were born and grew up on. For some unexplainable reason, many people try to plaster over the vast differences between European and American civilizations. The founders of the American republic had to grapple with these issues. Although some will cite ancient Greece as the birthplace of democracy, America is arguably the birthplace of modern democracy and the oldest existing democracy. In a 1993 interview, Margaret Thatcher said it may be the ONLY real democracy. Having lived in Europe myself for a couple of years, I think a good case could be made for her point.
America was born out of revulsion not merely for Britain's tyrannical rule but for the entire concept of what made it tyrannical, the basic underlying assumptions that justified government to rule at all. In inventing a government that it hoped would never be able to evolve into anything that resembled Europe, it had to tread new ground. Its first effort under the Articles of Confederation was a failure because the central government was too weak. The Constitution would also have failed to gain support had it not been for the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments severely restricting what government can do. Unlike Europeans, Americans are ever suspicious of government and vigilant over its abuses. Government is for America the refuge of last resort to solve problems, in Europe it's the first place to go.
Europe does not exist today as the result of radical revolution but of gradual evolution. The problem is that the culture of tyrannical dictatorship is still deeply ingrained in the structure of its governments, the concept of the EU, the methods used, and the popular culture which accepts it all almost unquestioningly. It is hardly surprising that when you get past the polite niceities of civility, the two civilizations loathe each other. They are the antithesis of each other. America's is the antithesis of Europe by design.
In the Superman Comic Book there is a Bizarro world in a Bizarro parallel universe. We are introduced to it by visits back and forth between them by Superman and the Bizarro superman. Everything that exists in our universe has its bizarro counterpart but they function exactly oppositely from the way they do in the normal world. This is how I view Europe. Everything that exists in my universe in America has its counterpart in Europe but they function exactly oppositely no matter what they are called. Just compare the Constitutuions.
In the Bizarro world, nothing functions the way it is supposed to. Everything is backwards. The people who live there accept it as normal. To them we live in a Bizarro world. This is the prism through which Europe and America see each other, mirror images but each a radical distortion of the other. No matter how much we try to avoid it, psychologists tell us our personalities are formed for life by the time we are five years old. It is extremely difficult to change one's basic perspective of life after that. It is of course much easier for people who come from an irrational world to function in a rational one than the other way around. Living in Europe for a relatively brief period was interesting but it is not something I could have accepted for a lifetime. I could not have functioned and been happy in that universe.
The referendum in Ireland was the last vestige of a pretense of democracy in Europe. If history is a guide, the tyrants who run the place will force the Irish to vote again and again on the issue until they get it right or they will recieve increasing punishment until they do. The EU is rapidly evolving to resemble the Soviet Union politically, econimically, socially, and in most other ways. Surely the British who voted to enter a free trade zone and were never given another chance again to say no can hardly pretend that denied a chance to vote on the most basic questions asked above that they have a democracy. Nor can their passivity in accepting their fate be denied as evidence that they do not value democracy or freedom, not even enough to fight for it with words and demands of their govenment let alone pledge their lives, their fortunes, or their sacred honor the way the founding fathers of the United States did.
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I think it is the people's RIGHT
to voted on this kind of stuff.
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