Thank you Ireland!
The Irish said “no” by a large majority to the European Treaty of Lisbon, three years after the rejection of the Constitution by the French and Dutch in 2005. According to the final official results, the no won with 53.4% votes, against 46.6% “yes”. (…) Ireland, the only European country to have submitted the European treaty to a referendum, rejected the text on June 12 by 53.4% of the votes, precipitating the EU into a new institutional crisis. Its fate became even more uncertain with President Lech Kaczinsky’s refusal to sign it even though the treaty was ratified by Polish MPs. He then received the support of his Czech counterpart Vaclav Klaus. But the ratification process in other states has not stopped. The Dutch Senate on Tuesday adopted by a large majority a law paving the way for the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by the Netherlands, after a first favorable vote by the lower house of parliament in early June. This approval is unsurprising, the Dutch political class having reached a consensus on the subject, even though the Dutch no to a referendum on the European Constitution had contributed, with the French rejection, to burying this text in 2005. The Netherlands- Bas are the 21st country to ratify the text, supposed to improve the functioning of European institutions. In Spain, the treaty was approved on June 26 by the lower house of parliament, with the Senate vote being a matter of formalities. Its entry into force was initially scheduled for January 1, 2009. It will now be at least delayed, even if many leaders hope that the treaty will come into force in time for the European elections in June 2009. (Sud-Presse, 08-07 -2008)
The process of creating a statist Europe, contrary to the spirit of its founding fathers, materialized in the 1990s with the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam. From there, the European process began to raise strong skepticism. The ratification of the Maastricht Treaty was laborious, with its rejection by the Danish electorate on June 2, 1992 and its narrow approval (51.05%), despite the enormous resources mobilized in its favor by the French electorate. The Treaty of Nice was rejected by the Irish in 2001. The draft European Constitution was rejected by the French and the Dutch in 2005. The Treaty of Lisbon, which retains the essence of the draft Constitution, was rejected in 2008 by the Irish . Faced with this popular resistance, the reactions of the political class are always the same.
Minimization: it is claimed that the Irish “no” would only be an accident. The lessons of this Irish referendum are however clear: affection and mobilization for the European project are lacking within the Twenty-Seven. This is far from anecdotal. Furthermore, like all European treaties since the founding act of Rome in 1957, the Lisbon Treaty signed by the Twenty-Seven on December 13, 2007 can only come into force after having been ratified by all the member states of The union.
It is also argued that less than a quarter of the population of an island of 4 million inhabitants is blocking the reform of the institutions of a European Union which has nearly 500 million. But this argument does not hold, since the other Europeans were not consulted. If the popular vote were widespread today, at least one in three EU countries would vote no.
The denigration: consulting the people would be an inept exercise, on the one hand because it would be extremely complicated for the citizen to grasp all the issues, on the other hand because national referendums would serve as an outlet for a population quick to give an answer that is not necessarily related to the question asked. In the Irish case, the “no” camp would be heterogeneous and its campaign would be based on hazardous interpretations of the content of the treaty.
This argument is the prototype of the anti-democratic argument. The principle of democracy by universal suffrage is to respect the popular vote and not to distinguish between classes of more or less enlightened citizens. Citizens are not fools. They feel, sometimes intuitively, where we want to take them. For the most part, the debate was intelligent and informed. The “yes” camp is just as heterogeneous as the “no” camp, when it does not have the homogeneity of conservatism. In the Irish case, the population clearly felt that the implications of the treaty would sooner or later cause them to lose control of certain values. The creation of a European defense and foreign policy, for example, is indeed contradictory with Irish neutrality.
The circumvention: everywhere, parliamentary ratification was chosen in order to avoid failure at the ballot box. And yet, 76% of Germans, 75% of British, 72% of Italians, 65% of Spaniards are in favor of the referendum.
The European project thus becomes an arrangement within the political class. There is no better way to discredit the European project and the political class as a whole! The French and Dutch cases are particularly blatant since in these countries the popular vote clearly rejected (55% and more) the draft Constitution, and it has escaped no one’s notice that the Treaty of Lisbon takes up the essentials of this draft Constitution. From the moment the Lisbon Treaty is not substantially different from that of 2004, asking Parliaments to disavow the people reduces citizens’ confidence in the political and constitutional system, undermines the credibility of Parliaments, locks in the Political Europe in the circle of politicians, and denies it true democratic legitimacy.
Overwhelm: a variant of the circumvention strategy consists, under the pretext of further consulting the people, of fleeing forward by organizing a referendum at the level of the Twenty-Seven on the same day. Thus national specificities would be submerged, and citizens located on either side of a continent would decide the fate of others without knowing their national situation, their own values, or their specific arguments. It would become easier to isolate and crush local reactions, often emanating from small countries, to the process of European state integration.
The Irish people, who had the chance to be consulted, said no. Despite this, and despite the wishes of the people, the European Union continues as if nothing had happened, waiting for a possible solution to the “Irish problem”. However, it is not this vote which creates a crisis, but indeed the determination of European leaders to take no account of it.
Faced with this vote and others of the same type, there is only one possible democratic direction: recognize that when the people say no, it is no.
