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The Irish ‘No’ won’t last
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The immediate question for Europe’s leaders after the Irish referendum rejected the European Union’s new “constitutional” treaty by 54 percent to 46 percent is how they will contrive to frustrate the will of the people yet again.
The grandees of Europe do not give up easily, even though their voters have a troublesome habit of saying “No” on those rare occasions when the question of Europe is put. The Danes, the Swedes, the French, the Dutch and the Irish (twice) have rejected the grand European project.
But Europe’s leaders appear determined to press ahead with the Lisbon Treaty the Irish have rejected. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a joint statement: “The ratification procedure is already complete in 18 countries. We hope therefore that the other member states will persevere with the ratification process.”
The president of the EU Commission, Jose Barroso, declared: “The treaty is not dead. The treaty is alive, and we will try to work to find a solution.”
Italian Foreign Affairs Minister Franco Frattini said: “This is a serious blow to European construction,” but “the path of European integration must not however be stopped.”
So how will they fudge it? The first plan was simple: get the Irish to vote again until they give the right answer. That was what was done the last time the Irish said “No.” Some solemn new EU document that asserted Ireland’s right to set its own taxes and to maintain its official neutrality would meet some of the Irish complaints.
But Plan A foundered on the Irish government’s instincts for survival. Prime Minister Brian Cowen is against a second referendum, fearing punishment by frustrated voters.
So Plan B is to isolate the Irish. The ratification process will continue so that 26 of the EU’s 27 member states will be committed. Then they will cobble the key bits of the Lisbon Treaty onto the new accession Treaty that makes Croatia into a full member late next year or in 2010, and get the Irish (without a referendum) to ratify that. Hey, presto, it is fixed.
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Plan B may well succeed, but at a dangerous cost. Doubtless there were local reasons for all the successive “No” votes in the various countries that held referendums in recent years, but there was a common thread. The European voters are suspicious of their leaders, suspicious of the grand European project, and alarmed the whole EU process seems so remote, so bureaucratic and undemocratic in ignoring or fudging or working around other rejections by referendum.
This issue is acute in Britain, where a referendum on the EU constitution was promised to the voters, but abruptly withdrawn when the constitution morphed into a treaty. On Wednesday Britain’s House of Lords is scheduled to give the ratification bill its third reading, which would effectively pass it into law.
“To simply plow ahead on a straight vote to accept or reject the EU (Amendment) Bill is to demonstrate nothing less than a contempt for the democracy on which the European Union is supposed to be founded,” commented Lord David Owen, a former British foreign secretary.
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As one of Ireland’s “No” voters asked an RTE radio interviewer: “What part of ‘No’ don’t they understand?”
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