Tag Archives: Ireland

The Irish are stupid, apparently

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I don’t even have to check the usual eurosceptic sources to know how the Irish government’s research into the reasons for the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty is likely to be interpreted. Because, you see, they’ve found that the reason for the No vote was that the Irish people didn’t know enough about the treaty.

Cue screams of outrage from the eurosceptic hoardes: “You see! They’re going to tell us we don’t know what’s good for us! The people are stupid! They’ll press ahead with it anyway because they can use this to show we can’t be trusted! The elitist bastards!”

Well, perhaps. There are, after all, already rumours circulating of a second referendum being planned for next year – though it’s unlikely to be before the European Parliament elections or the arrival of the new Commission. But despite the torrent of frustrated voices from across the Channel calling for a fresh vote, read between the lines and it’s quite clear that the Irish government itself has made no such plans. Yet. Hell, even the latest suggestions of a fresh vote stem merely from a briefing paper prepared for the French EU presidency – and we all know that Sarkozy’s in favour of forcing the thing through (why else would he deny the people of France a vote on a treaty so heavily based on the constitution. Briefing papers – despite the spin – are not official EU policy.

But the thing is, this new research tells us nothing new. We knew ages ago from exit polls and countless surveys before the vote that one of the major reasons for the Irish No was that the treaty (and the constitution before that) was simply too complex, vague and self-contradictory for its own good. In trying to be everything to all people during the tortuous negotiations between the various EU member states, it ended up having all the usual characteristics of a bad compromise worked out in umpteen languages – wording that could be interpreted pretty much any way you like. Not much good for a legal document – and a disaster for its advocates, as every pressure group with a grudge was able to find something to worry about.

In other words, the reason that the Irish people didn’t understand the Lisbon Treaty is because it was rubbish.

Does this mean it shouldn’t be ratified anyway? Well, that’s up to the Irish government. The EU certainly shouldn’t (and under the present rules can’t) progress without unanimity on the treaty. And if one thing is certain to bolster the anti-treaty vote, it’s a bunch of Johnny Foreigners telling the Irish that they’re stupid. Ireland’s had enough of a bunch of foreigners painting them as idiots and telling them what to do – and look how well that turned out for the foreigners in question…

The Lisbon Treaty: Why so unpopular?

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It’s the single most important question – because without an answer, how can the EU progress? Brian Barder has a good stab at providing an answer – well worth reading in full:

most of the sentiments, worries and concerns contributing to the No vote in the referendum are widely shared in many other EU countries; few are unique to Ireland, and those that are probably have similar counterparts elsewhere in the EU. The people of some EU countries differ from the Irish in exhibiting a high level of antipathy to the whole European project: the UK is certainly one of these, and some of the new eastern and central European countries (and/or their leaders) are others. Even those who are generally pro-European are often critical of the lack of transparency of many of the processes of the EU, of the centripetal tendencies of the Commission, of the failure to clean up the Union’s finances, of what is rather vaguely referred to as the democratic deficit. All such tendencies will tend to predispose a goodly number of individual European voters to vote No in a referendum on almost any proposition recommended to them by their political leaders, however intrinsically innocuous.

The only trouble with all this is, of course, that the “why” ends up complicating the issue yet further. Rather than being merely an Irish problem, or merely a European one, the Irish “no” ends up due to global concerns – and, let’s face it, what isn’t a global issue these days?

This makes the “No” problem far harder to solve, for sure. But it also surely helps underscore just how ineffective individual nation states have become at dealing with problems that are increasingly global in scale. Strength in numbers sounds like an ever safer bet the more the economy suffers jitters and the more that globalisation continues.

This is something that the whole EU can, with any luck, start to get behind – because it’s the whole reason that pretty much every member state joined in the first place. Its the economy, stupid – and I’d say it’s about time the various leaders of the various EU member states began to remember that. The fancy bits and high ideals can come later – the first step is to bolster the economic base. That was the initial aim of the European Project, after all. The EU should remember that it needs to learn to walk before it tries sprinting…

Note: This is another in an apparently ongoing series of occasional posts where I’m effectively thinking out loud. I’ll have changed my mind again in a couple of hours, most likely…

More Irish referendum aftermath thoughts

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First up, Nanne’s done a handy roundup of blog reactions (with a few more from RZ) – which further goes to show that there’s no real consensus on what the hell should be done. Some more fervent pro-EU types are adopting the “sod the Irish” approach of continuing ratification and booting Ireland out of the EU if they don’t follow along like a well-trained dog. Some anti-EU types are revelling in the red faces in Brussels and calling for the whole thing to be scrapped again because (obviously) a no vote in a referendum means that every single person voting no did so because they hate the EU and everything it stands for. Neither extreme, fairly obviously, is a sensible option.

Me? I’m still at the stage of thinking out loud, so to speak – reading and writing helps me to work out what I think about things, which is why I started blogging in the first place. I’m still not sure if I’m getting anywhere on the short-term solution. Longer-term I have a far firmer idea of what I’d like to see done – but the likelihood of that coming to pass is minimal, so I’ll leave it for now.

Having read a lot of stuff about the vote over the weekend, the best comment piece I’ve seen so far comes – as so often – from the Financial Times. This quotation is somewhat selective, but gives an inkling of what’s becoming my approach:

First the French, then the Dutch and now the Irish have rejected much the same package of institutional reforms that were supposed to make an enlarged EU more effective and more democratic… Their attitude suggests a worrying gulf between EU decision-makers and popular feeling that needs a new sort of response… The No vote[s were] based on a ragbag of reasons to which there is no obvious response.”

In the FT’s take, a repeat referendum would likewise return a “No” – and I imagine the same would be the case in France and the Netherlands had they been given a chance to vote on the Lisbon Treaty as they were on the Constitution. The anger in France at the two fingers the politicians raised to the people by denying them another vote on a treaty that was so similar to a text that had already been popularly rejected is immense. Who can blame them?

Because the biggest problem facing the EU now is not the much-needed institutional reforms that Lisbon (and the constitution, and Nice) was trying to fix to help the thing function more effectively – it is that the people of Europe are increasingly starting to think that there may well be something in all those allegations of the EU being an undemocratic project of the quasi-mythical political elites for the benefit of those same elites. And you can hardly blame them – French and Dutch “No” votes have already been ignored, the Danish and Irish people have already been told to vote again when they returned the wrong result the first time, and now it looks like the inconvenience of the Irish people voting “No” again is going to lead to some kind of get-around. It’s hard to think of the last time the people of Europe were consulted and their opinions actually taken on board. In fact, I can’t think of a time this has happened – bar the odd small-scale experiment as part of the Plan D initiative over the last couple of years.

Does it matter that on numbers alone the “No” voters in Ireland are a tiny percentage of the EU’s population as a whole? Not while the rest of that population doesn’t get a vote it doesn’t – as pointed out elsewhere, so what if “only” 860,000 Irish voted “No” when the rest of the EU denies the people a vote and leaves the decision up to a mere 9,000-odd politicians? And what does it matter while the EU continues to function with its current set-up, with smaller countries given disproportionate influence to counter the dominance of those with larger populations? The Lisbon Treaty aimed to fix some of the more silly elements of this, but Maltese MEPs would continue to represent 80,000 Maltese compared to German MEPs representing 800,000 Germans – and in many areas the national veto would still have been maintained. Because part of the very point of the EU is to prevent the larger, stronger countries from dominating the continent. To ignore Ireland’s vote is therefore to go against the very essence of what the EU was set up to achieve.

(Please also note that I say all this as someone who argued repeatedly against holding referenda on the constitution and Lisbon treaty. Contradictory? Possibly – but if you hold votes you’d damned well better abide by the results. If not, the people will tend to get increasingly annoyed with you. It’s bad public relations as much as it’s bad democracy.)

In any case, the FT’s proposal for the next step is one of the least contentious I’ve seen so far, and (I hope) the most likely short-term outcome:

It would be more sensible to put the Lisbon treaty on ice for several years, and try to rescue those parts that are important, uncontentious, and capable of being carried out without treaty amendment… Europe does not need to turn the drama of the Irish No vote into a fully-fledged crisis of confidence. Everyone is fed up with negotiating new treaties. The priority should be to make the EU work better with practical policies… with its present rules and 27 member states. The Nice treaty is not ideal, but losing Lisbon should not be seen as the end of the world.

Calm-headedness is the way forward, for sure. But, as I say, the institutional problems are no longer the most pressing. What is needed now more than ever is an energetic campaign to get the people of Europe on board. Mere propaganda drives will not do it – they need to be brought into the debate and made to feel that their voices count. Because currently – with the European Parliament still largely toothless and the French, Dutch and Irish referendum results all more or less dismissed by the powers that be – you can hardly blame people for feeling that in the EU, the people count for nothing.

The Lisbon Treaty is dead

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But considering it was largely the unconvincing zombie resurrection of the old Constitution anyway, it probably won’t be fully dead until someone’s cut its head off, put a stake through its heart, shot it repeatedly with silver bullets, smothered it in garlic-infused holy water, and tricked it into saying its name backwards three times.

Note to the EU: for Christ’s sake, can we please actually THINK about the next step this time? In detail? Preferably without the assumption that the people are too stupid to notice what you’re trying to pull on them (thus alienating them yet further from a project which seems increasingly separated from the needs of the European people) – and ideally with the people in full, genuine consultation at every stage.

The continent of Europe is far, far too diverse for such idealistic “one size fits all” projects to have any place in future EU planning – unless it’s the most basic statement of shared ideals and principles, along the lines of the American declaration of independence or the US constitution. Surely that much is obvious? Just like the American colonies – only far, far more so – Europe is not made up of one united people; we are many peoples with much shared history and culture, but with plenty that also divides us in terms of hopes, dreams and aspirations. The old Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty – hell, pretty much every EU and EEC treaty ever ratified – failed sufficiently to acknowledge this, and so failed to allay concerns. The longer this went on – especially as the EU’s power and presence seemed to continue to grow without so much as a by your leave from a democratic vote – the more annoyed, the more distrustful the people of Europe were bound to become.

The European project was started by political elites as a trade association with delusions of grandeur. It is now much, much more than that, with competence creep after competence creep. It is too unwieldy and unaccountable for the people of a continent with more than its fair experience of despotism and dictatorship not to start taking offence if it continues down the route of “what we say goes, and there’s not much you can do about it”.

I believe in the principles behind the European Union. I believe that the European Union has done far, far more good than harm both in Europe itself and worldwide. I believe that the European Union should continue. But not in the direction it is currently heading. Not with the attitude it has currently got.

The Lisbon Treaty is dead – don’t make the same mistake as last time of trying to dress up the corpse to make it look a bit different. Accept the fundamental failure of the treaty (and constitution), and accept that a far more radical solution is vital. A complete rethink. A deep, serious analysis of what the EU is and what it is for – and, most importantly, what the European people think it is for. This is something that hasn’t happened in decades, but that is absolutely essential if the EU is to avoid the further alienation of its citzens – citizens who, it should be noted, have not all been asked if they want such citizenship in the first place.

The EU has evolved gradually over the years based on vague dreams. It’s time for a reality check.

(BBC story on initial reports of the lost Irish referendum here)

Update: As the count’s not final yet (this post was written at around 15:30 UK time), keep an eye on the Irish Times’ Lisbon Treaty site, with real-time updates. The current tally is 46.3% yes, 53.7% no. Elsewhere I’ve seen turnouts estimated at 40-45% – not huge, but not bad for EU-related elections, and more than the last Irish rejection of a European treaty back in 2001, even if the margin of rejection seems to be smaller this time…

What is the EU for?

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Is the Lisbon Treaty finished? Well, if you have a gander at the latest poll of voting intentions in the Irish referendum on the thing, then yes. Because it can’t be passed without unanimous support from all 27 member states, and if the Irish people vote no, it has to be rethought and redrawn. Again.

Only 30% for the yes camp, with 35% in the no – and rapidly rising. Doesn’t look good for the pro-treaty brigade, does it? And all this from the Celtic tiger – one of the poorest European countries before joining what is now the EU, now one of the wealthiest. There’s gratitude for you!*

But the real revelation of this poll? It confirms something I’ve always maintained about a referendum for such a complex international treaty:

The reason most often cited by No voters is that they don’t know what they are voting for or they don’t understand the treaty – with 30 per cent of No voters listing this as the main reason for their decision

If you don’t understand something, don’t vote for it strikes me as an eminently sensible policy.

And herein lies the EU’s biggest flaw – as I’ve repeatedly stated here and elsewhere for years, the EU is far too complex to understand. Simplification is the key – and a constitution of sorts was the perfect opportunity to simplify. A few basic principles – nothing horrific. And what did they do? Churn out an incomprehensibly thick document full of meaningless subclauses and vague platitudes in an attempt to minimise dissent, ensuring that no one – not even those involved in drafting the thing – could agree on what it was actually setting out to do.

But even drawing up a simple, US-style constitution of a minimal number of first principles isn’t as simple as it sounds. An EU promoting free trade? You’ll be opposed by those wanting a “Social Europe”. Human rights sound like a nice thing to get behind, right? Well, it depends whose human rights – and whether you can agree to lump the basics of “don’t torture people” in with the more contentious “right” to taxpayer-funded benefits.

The Irish people don’t know what the Lisbon Treaty is all about? Little wonder when even the member states can’t agree what the EU itself is about.

This is the central problem with which the EU has been trying to come to terms since the end of the Cold War. It is the problem the Treaty of Nice was supposed to address, then the Constitution, and now Lisbon. And they still haven’t got an answer to the fundamental questions: what is the EU for?

* Note: Yes, I am fully aware that the Irish economic miracle cannot be put solely down to its membership of the EEC/EU – but you’d surely have to be somewhat ideologically blinkered to deny that membership had any part to play in Ireland’s success.