This is an excellent article on the EU's reaction to Irelands no vote on the EU Treaty:
"Now it’s clear: the EU is an alien imposition in Europe
They have been libelled as an uneducated ‘horde’, yet Irish voters’ rejection of the Lisbon Treaty is a brilliant blow against the EU oligarchy.
Oligarchs cannot stand public humiliation. So when, last Thursday, the Irish electorate pointed their fingers and shouted ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’, the political elites of the European Union pretended that it was not them who stood exposed, but the Irish people.
EU officials, politicians and their friends in the media all read from the same carefully rehearsed script following the Irish electorate’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. Adopting a kind of fantasy language, with all the hallmarks of classic Orwellian doublespeak, the EU and its representatives told the world that the ‘No’ vote did not really mean ‘No’, since Irish voters were thoroughly confused.
They argued that the vote lacked meaning or legitimacy because the campaign against the Lisbon Treaty – the name given to the rebranded EU Constitution – encompassed far too many different interest groups to be taken seriously. Apparently, a campaign that successfully brings together people from the far left to the Catholic right cannot be a genuine expression of popular will.
Once the results were announced, EU officials went straight into action, making it clear that the outcome of the Irish referendum would not be respected. Consider the breathtaking cynicism of the EU Commissioner Margaret Wallström. She told the BBC that we must ‘analyse’ the Irish result and then conduct a public survey to find out what was behind the ‘No’ vote. Taking on the role of a disinterested doctor or scientist, Wallström believes that ‘research’ can discover the source of the Irish disease; such ‘research’ will no doubt lead to the cobbling together of a diagnosis, and then a cure.
The rejection of the proposed EU Constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005 represented an important blow for freedom, and a challenge to the aloof, technocratic politics of the EU. However, even though Ireland is a small nation which lacks the economic and political influence of France or Holland, its ‘No’ vote was, in many respects, even more significant. Perhaps the most important contribution made by the Irish ‘No’ campaign has been to give some clarity to the disconnection between the electorate and the political class.
Voters and the political class do not only inhabit different worlds – they speak in different languages. Of course, the disconnection between the people of Europe and the institutions of the European Union has been evident for some time. Yet normally, this distance between voters and their rulers expressed itself in falling voter turnout and declining levels of participation in party political activity; surveys also showed that EU institutions lack legitimacy amongst the public, and that officialdom is out of touch with public sensibilities. The ‘No’ vote in Ireland, however, has revealed something far more important: that for a significant section of the public, elite EU institutions are not only illegitimate – they are an alien imposition.
It is rare indeed for the entire EU oligarchy and political class to join together with the media, the trade unions and the Catholic Church to take on the people. Even the poor old Pope got in on the act: he tried to provide some moral support to his mates in Brussels and Dublin in the run-up to the Irish referendum by giving a speech on the importance of the EU for countries like Ireland. This display of elite unity is probably unprecedented; such unity was not achieved during the referenda in Holland and France. During previous referendum campaigns, things were a lot more confusing; they lacked the clarity of what took place in Ireland, where the people were on one side and virtually all of their ‘representatives’ were on the other.
The cultural dissonance between the elite and the people was on full display during the Irish referendum. It’s worth noting that those media commentators who denounced the rag-tag army of ‘No’ voters happily overlooked the rag-tag army of elite interests behind the ‘Yes’ campaign.
Another striking thing about the Irish experience is how clearly – crystal clearly – it showed up the anti-democratic impulse behind the EU project. In previous times, the EU’s public relations machine had some success in confusing the debate, with its representatives suggesting that it was the opponents of the EU who were a threat to democracy. Officials and commentators frequently argued that ‘No’ campaigners in Holland and France were motivated by a base hatred of foreigners; their campaigning and their voting choices were denounced as ‘xenophobic’ and ‘anti-immigrant’.
The press frequently portrayed opposition to the EU Constitution as a revolt of the reactionary and the prejudiced against modern and enlightened institutions. One British newspaper described the Irish ‘No’ campaigners – all those ‘ultra-rightwing Catholics, neoliberals, pragmatic Eurosceptics, traditional nationalists and Trotskyists’ – as ‘not so much a rainbow alliance as a horde of Goths at the gates of Rome’ (1). Such a representation of recent events and votes in Europe has always been inaccurate; it has been a rather self-serving caricature of the electorate. Anti-immigrant and chauvinistic prejudice did motivate some of the individuals who have voted against the EU, but it has far from been the defining feature of the various ‘No’ campaigns of recent years.
Although a few people have tried it on, these tired old arguments about a revolt of the xenophobes against the enlightened EU cannot be credibly recycled in relation to the Irish referendum. There were simply no angry mobs of right-wing nationalists. So instead, EU propagandists were forced to fall back on explicit nineteenth-century style anti-mass arguments. Back in the nineteenth century, one of the arguments used by arrogant reactionaries against the expansion of the democratic franchise was that the people were too stupid to understand the complexities of parliamentary democracy. It was argued that people of low intelligence, who lacked refinement and good schooling, could not possibly be trusted to exercise any public duties judiciously.
More or less the same arguments were voiced during the Irish referendum campaign. Time and again, the EU and its supporters informed the world that the Irish electorate was thoroughly confused about the issues at stake, and that it was the strength of this ‘public ignorance’ that propelled the ‘No’ campaign. This vitriolic contempt for the people really exposed the reluctance of the ‘Yes’ campaign to acknowledge the poverty of its own ideas.
One of the most disturbing features of the EU’s propaganda before, during and after the Irish referendum was the systematic attempt to infantilise the opponents of the EU. The Irish were described as ‘ungracious’ and ‘truculent’, as school pupils who disobeyed their teachers; they were depicted as children who refused to show sufficient gratitude for all the presents they have received from the EU (see Ireland, you ungrateful wretch!, by Brendan O’Neill). The Irish were continually reminded that their recent prosperity has been founded on EU largesse.
The message is clear: the immature response of the Irish people to the Lisbon Treaty should not be taken seriously. This relentless attempt to infantilise an entire people is an alarming historical moment. The reprimand of a naughty child always hints at future punishment. Will the EU do more than simply threaten to take the Irish children’s toys away? Let’s keep a very close eye on what the EU does next.
Frank Furedi is author most recently of Invitation To Terror: The Expanding Empire of The Unknown, published by Continuum Press. Visit Furedi’s website here."
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Uncylopedia: Irish voters got it all wrong
The Problem With Europe
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
By George Friedman
June 17, 2008
The creation of a European state was severely wounded if not killed last week. The Irish voted against a proposed European Union treaty that included creation of a full-time president, increased power to pursue a European foreign policy and increased power for Europe’s parliament. Since the European constitutional process depends on unanimous consent by all 27 members, the Irish vote effectively sinks this version of the new constitution, much as Dutch and French voters sank the previous version in 2005.
The Irish vote was not a landslide. Only 54 percent of the voters cast their ballots against the constitution. But that misses the point. Whether it had been 54 percent for or against the constitution, the point was that the Irish were deeply divided. In every country, there is at least a substantial minority that opposes the constitution. Given that all 27 EU countries must approve the constitution, the odds against some country not sinking it are pretty long. The Europeans are not going to get a strengthened constitution this way.
But the deeper point is that you can’t create a constitution without a deep consensus about needing it. Even when there is — as the United States showed during its Civil War — critical details not settled by consensus can lead to conflict. In the case of the United States, the issues of the relative power of states and the federal government, along with the question of slavery, ripped the country apart. They could only be settled by war and a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution forced through by the winning side after the war.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE
Creating a constitution is not like passing a law — and this treaty was, in all practical terms, a constitution. Constitutions do not represent public policy, but a shared vision of the regime and the purpose of the nation. The U.S. Constitution was born in battle. It emerged from a long war of independence and from the lessons learned in that war about the need for a strong executive to wage war, a strong congress to allocate funds and raise revenue, and a judiciary to interpret the constitution. War, along with the teachings of John Locke, framed the discussions in Philadelphia, because the founders’ experience in a war where there was only a congress and no president convinced them of the need for a strong executive. And even that was not enough to prevent civil war over the issue of state sovereignty versus federal sovereignty. Making a constitution is hard.
The European constitution was also born in battle, but in a different way. For centuries, the Europeans had engaged in increasingly savage wars. The question they wanted to address was how to banish war from Europe. In truth, that decision was not in their hands, but in the hands of Americans and Soviets. But the core issue remained: how to restrain European savagery. The core idea was relatively simple. European wars arose from European divisions; and, for centuries, those divisions ran along national lines. If a United States of Europe could be created on the order of the United States of America, then the endless battling of France, Germany and England would be eliminated.
In the exhaustion of the postwar world — really lasting through the lives of the generation that endured World War II — the concept was deeply seductive. Europe after World War II was exhausted in every sense. It allowed its empires to slip away with a combination of indifference and relief. What Europeans wanted postwar was to make a living and be left alone by ideology and nationalism; they had experienced quite enough of those two. Even France under the influence of Charles de Gaulle, the champion of the idea of the nation-state and its interests, could not arouse a spirit of nationalism anywhere close to what had been.
There is a saying that some people are exhausted and confuse their state with virtue. If that is true, then it is surely true of Europe in the last couple of generations. The European Union reflected these origins. It began as a pact — the European Community — of nations looking to reduce tariff barriers. It evolved into a nearly Europe-wide grouping of countries bound together in a trade bloc, with many of those countries sharing a common currency. Its goal was not the creation of a more perfect union, or, as the Americans put it, a “novus ordo seclorum.” It was not to be the city on the hill. Its commitment was to a more prosperous life, without genocide. Though not exactly inspiring, given the brutality of European history, it was not a trivial goal.
The problem was that when push came to shove, the European Community evolved into the European Union, which consisted of four things:
1. A free trade zone with somewhat synchronized economic polices, not infrequently overridden by the sovereign power of member states.
2. A complex bureaucracy designed to oversee the harmonization of European economies. This was seen as impenetrable and engaged in intensive and intrusive work from the trivial to the extremely significant, charged with defining everything from when a salami may be called a salami and whether Microsoft was a monopoly.
3. A single currency and central bank to which 15 of the 27 EU members subscribed.
4. Had Ireland voted differently, a set of proto-institutions would have been created — complete with a presidency and foreign policy chief — which would have given the European Union the trappings of statehood. The president, who would rotate out of office after a short time, would have been the head of one of the EU member states.
REJECTING A EUROPEAN REGIME
The Irish referendum was all about transforming the fourth category into a regime. The Irish rejected it not because they objected to the first three sets of solutions — they have become the second-wealthiest country in Europe per capita under their aegis. They objected to it because they did not want to create a European regime. As French and Dutch voters have said before, the Irish said they want a free trade zone. They will put up with the Brussels bureaucracy even though its intrusiveness and lack of accountability troubles them. They can live with a single currency so long as it does not simply become a prisoner of German and French economic policy. But they do not want to create a European state.
The French and German governments do want to create such a state. As with the creation of the United States, the reasons have to do with war, past and future. Franco-German animosity helped created the two world wars of the 20th century. Those two powers now want a framework for preventing war within Europe. They also — particularly the French — want a vehicle for influencing the course of world events. In their view, the European Union, as a whole, has a gross domestic product comparable to that of the United States. It should be the equal of the United States in shaping the world. This isn’t simply a moral position, but a practical one. The United States throws its weight around because it can, frequently harming Europe’s interests. The French and Germans want to control the United States.
To do this, they need to move beyond having an economic union. They need to have a European foreign and defense policy. But before they can have that, they need a European government that can carry out this policy. And before they can have a European government they must have a European regime, before which they must have a European constitution that enumerates the powers of the European president, parliament and courts. They also need to specify how these officials will be chosen.
The French and Germans would welcome all this if they could get it. They know, given population, economic power and so on, that they would dominate the foreign policy created by a European state. Not so the Irish and Danes; they understand they would have little influence on the course of European foreign policy. They already feel the pain of having little influence on European economic policy, particularly the policies of the European Central Bank (ECB). Even the French public has expressed itself in the 2006 election about fears of Brussels and the ECB. But for countries like Ireland and Denmark, each of which fought very hard to create and retain their national sovereignty, merging into a Europe in which they would lose their veto power to a European parliamentary and presidential system is an appalling prospect.
Economists always have trouble understanding nationalism. To an economist, all human beings are concerned with maximizing their own private wealth. Economists can never deal with the empirical fact that this simply isn’t true. Many Irish fought against being cogs in a multinational British Empire. The Danes fought against being absorbed by Germany. The prospect of abandoning the struggle for national sovereignty to Europe is not particularly pleasing, even if it means economic advantage.
Europe is not going to become a nation-state in the way the United States is. It is increasingly clear that Europeans are not going to reach a consensus on a European constitution. They are not in agreement on what European institutions should look like, how elections should be held and, above all, about the relation between individual nations and a central government. The Europeans have achieved all they are going to achieve. They have achieved a free trade zone with a regulatory body managing it. They have created a currency that is optional to EU members, and from which we expect some members to withdraw from at times while others join in. There will be no collective European foreign or defense policy simply because the Europeans do not have a common interest in foreign and defense policy.
PARIS READS THE WRITING ON THE WALL
The French have realized this most clearly. Once the strongest advocates of a federated Europe, the French under President Nicolas Sarkozy have started moving toward new strategies. Certainly, they remain committed to the European Union in its current structure, but they no longer expect it to have a single integrated foreign and defense policy. Instead, the French are pursuing initiatives by themselves. One aspect of this involves drawing closer to the United States on some foreign policy issues. Rather than trying to construct a single Europe that might resist the United States — former President Jacques Chirac’s vision — the French are moving to align themselves to some degree with American policies. Iran is an example.
The most intriguing initiative from France is the idea of a Mediterranean union drawing together the countries of the Mediterranean basin, from Algeria to Israel to Turkey. Apart from whether these nations could coexist in such a union, the idea raises the question of whether France (or Italy or Greece) can simultaneously belong to the European Union and another economic union. While questions — such as whether North African access to the French market would provide access to the rest of the European Union — remain to be answered, the Germans have strongly rejected this French vision.
The vision derives directly from French geopolitical reality. To this point, the French focus has been on France as a European country whose primary commitment is to Europe. But France also is a Mediterranean country, with historical ties and interests in the Mediterranean basin. France’s geographical position gives it options, and it has begun examining those options independent of its European partners.
The single most important consequence of the Irish vote is that it makes clear that European political union is not likely to happen. It therefore forces EU members to consider their own foreign and defense policies — and, therefore, their own geopolitical positions. Whether an economic union can survive in a region of political diversity really depends on whether the diversity evolves into rivalry. While that has been European history, it is not clear that Europe has the inclination to resurrect national rivalries.
At the same time, if France does pursue interests independent of the Germans, the question will be this: Will the mutual interest in economic unity override the tendency toward political conflict? The idea was that Europe would moot the question by creating a federation. That isn’t going to happen, so the question is on the table. And that question can be framed simply: When speaking of political and military matters, is it reasonable any longer to use the term Europe to denote a single entity? Europe, as it once was envisioned, appears to have disappeared in Ireland.
SG emailed me the following comment on Andy's original article:
the article is good, but it doesn't depict long-term and outreaching consequences, particularly for the accession and candidate countries, ENP (European Neighbourhood Policy)..etc.
there is truth in one of the last comments - about Ireland's progress after the EU funds poured in it, although there is no dilemma (for me) - "gratitude" should not influence voting and anyone's consciousness. however, again, so much hypocrisy in this - which consciousness, people's, politicians'--- a laugh...
Regarding SG's comment; on the point about Irelands progress after EU funds, it is true that in the past she has benefited from EU subsidies (although funds would need to be balanced against the billions in lost fisheries and sugar industries), however Ireland is now a net contributor by most calculations, added to which Ireland's competitive 12.5 per cent tax rate on company profits (a very important factor in their economic boom as it's one of the reasons companies like Google set up base there) might have been vunerable to new rules on 'distortion of competition'.
EU says "Wrong answer Ireland. Please try again."
Ireland under pressure to vote again on treaty
"The Irish government has been given four months to devise a strategy resurrecting Europe's grand reform project, with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France suggesting that the Irish may have to stage a second referendum on the incendiary issue."
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1412309.php/No_enlargement_without_Lisbon_Sarkozy_says__Roundup_
I view this setback as another positive outcome of the Irish no vote, as I am far from convinced further enlargement benefits the citizens of Great Britain, or France and Germany for that matter.
Hm. Yeah, instead of bringing political and economical stability in the Western Balkans region - bcs this is exactly why the enlargement is important -and avoid another war 300 or 400 km from Vienna - it's much better to employ energy, resources and manpower in Iraq and Afganistan or Israel. Such an attitude, of course, is no surprise from the British or French, but Germans for sure know better.
As British and French ignored (and "ignored" is a euphemism) the situation on the Balkans in the 90-ies (unlike Germans), I believe that this "setback" is probably viewed as in the previous comment, by a large number of people in the UK and/or France, the Netherlands...etc.
Bosnia & Herzegovina is on the brink of new conflict, but who cares, let's buy the real estate in Croatia, Montenegro or Albania for nothing, and keep all of them away as long as possible. It's all about money in the end, and not ideas, anyway..
As someone who experienced war I still hold, obviously, pretty naive illusions about the importance of peace and stability for all. Along with that, I believe that citizens of GB, France and Germany should stay at home and not be sent to peace-keeping, monitoring and other missions in the Western Balkans region (or any other). Would that count as a benefit?
Ok. Apologies if my previous post was glib. I agree with you about Iraq and Afganistan by the way.
I am not a supporter of the EU, that surprised you I'm sure, but I do agree that the EU has been a positive stabilising influence on new member states like former Eastern Block countries such as Bulgaria and Romania. By insisting member states meet certain criteria and adopt more civilized political and legal norms it has brought stability economically and politically. Timothy Garon Ash believes the EU is "the most successful example of peaceful regime change in our time" and there is some truth behind the hype.
However, there has been a massive democratic deficit for member states such as Great Britain. Over half the laws created each year in Britain are a result of the EU and yet British citizens have no direct influence over those laws. They didn't vote for this handover of power and they are right to resent it.
Immigration has become a big issue in the Britain, the scale of which is without precedent in our history. Arguments rage over the costs and benefits, but these arguments are largely hypothetical while Britain is a member state of the EU as 80% of immigration comes from within the EU.
Another confession, I am by instinct a conservative, and another big surprise. I believe in a limited state governing by the rule of law, but these goals aren't achievable within the EU as the EU commits member states to a heavily regulated social democratic model of Government. But if I was more of a socialist, believing in state ownership (or even a mixed economy of state owned and privately owned industry) the EU would still obstruct this.
The EU's push to standardisation of laws and regulations shows little sensitivity to the multitude of differences between countries. Many of the Irish voters felt that national traditions and values were being eroded or threatened by the EU (to give one example, a neutral nation they were alarmed by the treaty's proposal of an EU army). These concerns will seem trivial compared to the threat of war, but they matter to people, if the EU doesn't get it that's a problem.
Finally, the British believed they were only signing up to a free and open economic trading zone, but woke up to find that it's stated purpose was ever closer union, complete political and legal integration, something the British feel profoundly uncomfortable with.
For some reason, the world is full of people who send me ImpDec-related stuff instead of posting it themselves. Dearie me.
Here's SG's latest:
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I still think that having the EU is better than not having it all. And of course not only because that is the only force that can keep peace in the unstable region like the Balkans. There are so many aspects. E.g. the US and Japan are heading in the science, and in few years the BRIC will follow, and I doubt that any of the old big nations of Europe could follow the pace, isolated. The FP7 is making up for that, and positions European countries not to lose -or maybe to create or start dynamics regarding science and business.
Until 2004 I would have voted against the EU integration on the referendum. But we didn't have it. In the meantime I changed my mind. We had to introduce a large number of idiotic laws, which affect our daily life, and endanger the tradition and way of life, but the long-term benefit is stability that we all need so much, and, hopefully, some advance in a newly established democracy. Maybe even fight against crime and corruption, successfully (very funny, if you look at the eurocrats as the most birocratic administration that has not yet met to fight corruption amongst themselves, but true).
I commend this other thread to the house: EU accounts fail to clear watchdog for 11th year
It may make sense for the Balkans to be a part of the EU, I don't know if the reasons for Britain being a member state are as strong. Norway and Switzerland are very happy outside the EU, Britain might be better off outside too.
You're distinguising EU (European state) from the original EEC (trading bloc), I take it? I don't think that many people in the UK (me included) are against the EEC principle. Though as you say, doesn't seem to hurt Norway much to be outside it.
Wonder how easy it is for Norwegians to work in the EU?
Sarkozy: ‘Irish will vote again, there will be no EU Treaty Mk III'
Telegraph Blog
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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