The Irish No: what next?
I'm beginning to wonder if Europe's political leaders perhaps aren't very good at their jobs.
After all, they insist that the changes they want to make to the way the EU is run are vital. Trouble is, they don't seem able to persuade their voters. Not in France or the Netherlands three years ago, and not in Ireland last week.
Let's start by giving them the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that they haven't spent the best part of five years agonising over mind-numbingly complex voting formulae and textual amendments just because it's their idea of fun. Maybe they have a point when they say that the rules drawn up for a club of half a dozen don't work too well in a club of 27.
So why can't they convince the voters? First, I would suggest they haven't tried very hard. It all seems so obvious to them that it didn't occur to them that it might not seem so obvious to the rest of us. And anyway, it is all horribly complicated, so we probably wouldn't understand.
Second, they have been strangely reluctant to admit that if you're in a club with just a few other members, you're bound to have more influence than if there are more than two dozen. Voters in Ireland weren't slow to appreciate that if there's no longer a permanent Irish member of the European Commission, which is what the Lisbon treaty proposed, it's just possible that their interests may not be as well looked after as they used to be.
But there may also be a sub-text here as well. I remember in the early 1990s, when I used to cover EU summits as a matter of routine, that the UK government was always pushing for enlargement. "Wider, not deeper" was the mantra - for the simple reason that the Major government thought that if you could open up the EU to enough new members, then all this stuff about "ever-closer political union" would inevitably have to be cast aside.
As so often, the writers of "Yes, Minister" spelt it out with admirable clarity:
Jim Hacker: Why is the foreign office pushing for higher membership?
Sir Humphrey: I'd have thought that was obvious. The more members an organisation has, the more arguments it can stir up. The more futile and impotent it becomes.
Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey: We call it diplomacy, Minister.
(The full clip is here.)
Those who have been arguing with such conspicuous lack of success in favour of the Lisbon reforms say that without them, the EU will not be able to take effective action on climate change, energy security, or organised crime. If Europe wants to be able to stand up to the US, Russia, China and India, they say, it has to be able to speak with a single voice.
But my impression from having reported on the French, Dutch and Irish referendums is that a major factor in the Non/Nee/Nil votes was a simple, visceral suspicion of Brussels. True, Ireland has done very nicely in the past out of EU development grants - but more recently, there have also been large numbers of migrant workers arriving to take advantage of a booming economy.
To many EU voters - not only in France, the Netherlands and Ireland, but also in Germany, Italy and Spain -- EU enlargement has meant more foreign workers. And they just don't like it. Nor do they like being told to vote for something that they don't understand a word of, and which political leaders seem unable to explain.
So what about Croatia and Turkey, and Ukraine and Serbia, all of which are hoping to join the EU over the coming decade? My hunch is it ain't going to happen. Which causes much scratching of heads in some EU capitals, where diplomats are convinced that holding out EU membership as an incentive to democratise is a highly effective tool of diplomacy.
Perhaps John Major was right: you can have a wider EU, or a deeper, more integrated, EU. But you can't have both, or at least not until you've found a way to persuade voters that their interests are being looked after too.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~48~RS~)
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.
You have placed your thumb on the nub of the problem with the Lisbon Treaty when you say that the voters of Ireland, France and the Netherlands don't appreciate having to vote for something they don't understand and which the leaders of the EU seem unable to explain. My experience whether about investment choices or voter choices also tells me not to sign or check a box unless I understand what I am getting into. It is logical to assume that as more power is passed to Brussels less power and ability to control their own vital affairs will be available to the constituents of the formerly independent countries comprising the EU. The Wall Street Journal said on Saturday that the treaty's "unwieldy nature - it amounts to 356 amendments to existing EU agreements, as well as assorted declarations, protocols, and annexes [and this] made it a fat target for opponents of closer union."
Complain about this comment
Has anyone in the British government clearly and unambiguoulsly spelled out what
the government hopes for the European Union and for Britain's relation to it?
Such constitutional change should
be the subject of a referendum, once it is clearly spelled out.
Complain about this comment
I find it odd that opponents of the EU complain about the lack of democracy in the EU. Now we have the situation where 18 countries have approved the Lisbon Treaty. Eight more are in the process of approving the treaty. One country of some 3 million people have halted the progress of the other 450 odd million. Is that democracy?
The whole idea of holding a referendum on a very complex matter seems daft to me. Britain has a parlimentary system where we elect members to put forward policies, debate them and the put them into practice if there is a majority in favour in both houses. Tony Blair only offered the prospect of a referendum because Rupert Murdoch told him to do so knowing full well that his newspapers could scare enough people into voting NO!
When did a pro EU story last appear in a British newspaper? Did anyone point out that the poor value of the £ is costing British tourist a lot of money compared to tourists in Euro zone countries? We have to pay commission to buy Euros. The Dutch, French, Germans etc do not do that before going to Spain for example.
People in Britain need to wake up to what they are losing by default and scaremongering. We have far more to fear from Washington than Brussels.
Complain about this comment
what is the next step for ireland and the european union following the NO...
Complain about this comment
When I was visiting Dublin back in early May, the free weeklies there were summarizing the Lisbon Treaty for quick overview (or, to the best of their ability, anyway). From what I could see, the Lisbon Treaty saw the EU taking more control of trade and (from what appeared to me) to be overriding individual state rights in the process. Taoiseach Ahern apparently disagrees, stating, in his first day in office, that he'd fire any member of his cabinet who went against his "Yes" vote.
So what's he going to do now? Can 4 million people?
Complain about this comment
re comment 5. Actually it's can 900.000 Irish electors be wrong?
The number of 'yes' votes cast was 752,451, and the no's numbered 862,415. and the RIr electorate 3,041,000 rounded to nearest thousand. So there were 1,426,000 don't knows/not interested.
In the end about 28% of those entitled to vote said NO.
What we can say from all this is the 1.5 Million Irish electors did not express an opinion. Maybe voting in referenda should be compulsory.
Incidentally how many RIr/UK dual citizens took part?
Complain about this comment
re comment 3. It is odd that you (jimextory) think that democracy is being denied when one percent (the Rep of Ireland) of the population of the EU votes no on their referendum while the rest of the EU is denied the right to have referendums. This is odder still because you neglect or don't understand the history of why the Lisbon Treaty was put to a vote in the first place. The Lisbon Treaty is bascally a re-write of the EU constitutional treaty which was turned down in 2005, when the voters of the Netherlands and France voted no. The leaders of the EU refused to take this as an answer and instead came up with the Lisbon Treaty whose passage was restricted to the parliaments of the EU only - except for the Republic of Ireland whose constitution requires a referendum on matters of such great importance. Based on this history, I can predict that the leaders of the EU will come up with another undemocratic way to get the Lisbon Treaty passed by bypassing the constitutionally required referendum of the Republic of Ireland.
Complain about this comment
It has to be conceded that the EU leaders have had a very difficult job, small wonder they've not been completely successful at it yet. But give them time. After all, converting a structure which was organized as a trade agreement among half a dozen nations, an initial subterfuge to get the project going, into a continent sized political despotism encompassing 27 and possibly more nations later on and then sneaking it past 500 million expected dupes by making them think they will be gaining economically from giving up their political autonomy and freedom is no easy task. It must be done with the utmost of stealth and in collusion with the governments of all of the participants. When the governments of those nations which do not expect to benefit economically from this superstate because of its goal of social re-engineering through forced redistribution of wealth do not circumvent the popular will but instead allow voters to decide for themselves as they did in France, Holland, and now Ireland, there is the very real risk that the voters will see that this arrangement is not necessarily in their own best interest. The arguments and methods the EU and its stooges in the governments of its constuents use to persuade and trick their citizens into compliance are quite varied. Obfuscation is one. By constructing the treaties and constitution which transfer political power in language so legally arcane and making it so long winded that nobody of ordinary intelligence can understand it, it is left to the citizens to trust their leaders who advocate they endorse it. This plays into the European penchant for elitism, bowing to those who are supposedly smarter than they are, their intelligencia. By telling them they need to create a political entity which can stand up to the US, it plays to their penchant for chauvanism, the need to feel superior and having greater power and importance than others. Better to be a European citizen in a union which can stand up to America than an Irishman, Frenchman, German, or Brit in a nation which can't. But in Holland, France, and Ireland, the instinctive suspicion of an animal about to be slaughtered prevailed. It was Lincoln who said; "you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
"Sir Humphrey: I'd have thought that was obvious. The more members an organisation has, the more arguments it can stir up. The more futile and impotent it becomes.
Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey: We call it diplomacy"
Clearly this is not true. The US has 50 states. What it means is that if you want legislation enacted to benefit your cause, your constituency, you have to consider the impact it will have on others you do not directly represent and you will have to compromise and concede benefits to others in return. This is how the Congress of the United States conducts business and it was engineered so that if its members were not disposed to act this way, the Congress would be paralyzed. And it has worked fairly well for over 200 years. But I don't think European leaders think this way, especially those who prise the creation of a central despotism. It's their way or the highway.
As the basic European common view is one of centralized authority and conformity with complete submission to the arbitrary exercise of political power, and the monopolization of that power by a single group so that any challenge to it no matter how justified can't stand up to it and will always lose, it is inevitable that the EU will have its way and create the EU superstate. But where I come from we have a saying; be careful what you wish for, you never know when your wish might come true. And as I see it, the likely EU superstate that emerges will be a badly failed one not capable of standing up even to its own internal needs. It is showing strong signs of failure in almost every aspect already and it's hardly there yet.
Complain about this comment
what else can be done, for right now...have another vote?
Complain about this comment
"[Not] until you've found a way to persuade voters that their interests are being looked after too."
We can start with more informative programming on the BBC instead of over-simplified news, the politics of personality and chasing ratings.
To have an informed, educated public would mean greater social mobility and inclusion, I don’t see that happening any day soon unless independent thinkers, academics and the left are allowed more time on the mainstream media instead of the political and corporate elite wasting our time with "politically responsible" blurb.
One of the influences on the Irish referendum was that EU law interfered with their outdated laws on abortion, a pathetic indictment on the current leacy of political discourse.
Another influence on any referendum would be the widely held view that the EU is corrupt; the Financial Times had an article on a report about the extent of the corruption in the EU which could only be read in a secure unit on condition that the reader wouldn’t divulge the content of the report.
Complain about this comment
Comparisons are made between the former EU constitution and the US constitution but lets try a thought experiment......imagime that it was now discovered in the very very small print that there was a sunset clause in the US constitution and it runs out in December. (say the founding fathers were aware that times would change and wanted the people of 200 years into their future to have the opportunity to set their own norms into the foundation law and not be restricted by the norms of the late 1700's). Would a new US constitution be passed by state by state referenda? Some would vote against if it failed to explicitly prohibit abortion but some would vote no if it failed to provide for abortion. Some would oppose the right to bear arms while some would not accept any document without it. Would prostitution (legal in some states) be banned in the constitution or not? The list of "red lines" would go on. Would there be a right to leave the Union? Would it be right to force any state to be part of a new US if that state had rejected a proposed new constitution? It's not as straightforward as often suggested.
You're all doing very well !!
Complain about this comment
"EU TREATIES CAN HAVE MANY POTENTIAL VERSIONS... THE PROCESS USED TO WRITE EU TREATIES NEEDS TO BE FIXED!!!"
Residents of all EU member nations ought to be polled regarding their preferences for the structures, authorities and limitations of a future EU.
In other words... residents of ALL EU member nations ought to- at the minimum- be asked non-bindingly whether the future EU model they prefer is:
1) an EU Super State; or
2) an EU that is a loose association of
to-varying-degrees integrated, alligned, but independent nations...
Data from this process could then be used in the objective compilation of a new 'draft' EU (Constitution) Reform treaty (and future treaties), which could be put to binding referenda in all EU member nations...
Considering that the ratification of Constitution-like EU Treaties (such as the misnamed Reform Treaty) have vastly far reaching effects on ALL residents of ALL EU member nations- it is the opinions and views of this body of people, not only a very small subgroup of them- a microscopic few bureaucrats and politicians- that ought to be paramount when the clauses and content of Constitution-like EU Treaties (that are to be put to binding referenda) are determined...
An EU-wide, FUTURE-OF-THE-EU DIALOGUE-PROCESS is needed... This ought to be lead by the United Kingdom...
Roderick V. Louis,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada,
ceo@patientempowermentsociety.com
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS