With a margin of more than 100,000 votes, Ireland has rejected the EU Reform Treaty drafted at Lisbon. José Manuel Barroso has said that the Irish government will now need to present its analysis as to why the vote failed and proposal as to how it can be changed so as to satisfy the Irish electorate. In the meantime, he has encouraged all other 26 EU states to continue to ratify the document, which will all be done through parliaments without popular votes.
A couple of thoughts by a guy who has no right to think his political thoughts ought to be read by anyone.
In the wake of the serious drubbing this treaty has received by a good turnout in the one country that has benefited most from EU membership (and considering a document that differed less than 10% was rejected in France and Holland) one wonders if a theoretical popular vote in places like Denmark and Portugal wouldn’t return similar results. What does Lisbon mean? Only lawyers can know. What does it offer? “Efficiency gains”. Why do we need it? “Expansion” issues (that couldn’t have been forseen?).
Lisbon is an example of pragmatically implemented democracy. It is only as a result of a queer Supreme Court ruling that Ireland required a referendum. Otherwise it would have been passed through the representative houses of each nation, including ours. But once it was put to a group of people they loudly declared “NO!”. Since that group of people represent under 1% of the EU and their economy represents just over 1% of the EU, this NEIN could well be ignored and squashed down. It is hardly democratic to ignore the Irish people. Yet it is hardly democratic to force the Irish agenda on the rest of the EU, if as we can only assume, they are happy with Lisbon. Democracy has to be implemented as a principle, as a value, as a noble thought put into action across the board- or it sinks to the level of farce. A squashed referendum on a small island off the west coast won’t cause many ripples now. But things like this have a way of introducing cracks that grow and grow in the civic. If we ignore these results, how could Belgium or Slovenia trust that they won’t be silenced someday in the future? If the results are heeded and we go back to the drawing board, how can Ireland dare dictate to Spain and Poland about how to run the EU? If we go for a compromise solution, how can we get the competitive edge that prompted the whole process in the first place?
Pragmatic democracy is an oxymoron. Issues that are big like this should be decided by a continent-wide plebiscite.
Here’s my real question and my real reason for voting no. Maybe someone can help me out by giving me the simple answer. The American Senate represents a bigger territory, a more diverse population and considerably larger economy on a very simple basis. Every state gets two representatives. This might seem like a bad deal for California, to some people’s minds, the sixth biggest economy on Earth. Why should it vote with the same weight as little Rhode Island? Yet it works beautifully because it leads to true integrated thinking. California is going to look after its own concerns- that is natural and can be taken for granted. But this flat, disproportionate representation encourages communal thinking and decision making since California can’t work to the service of itself at the detriment of others.
At base, this inverted system makes sense because it treats states like individuals in a small community. One person, one vote. It doesn’t matter if you are Kevin Hargaden and paid less than a thousand euros in income tax last year or you are Michael O’Leary and (presumably) paid a lot more. Each man gets one vote. Why can’t the highest level of European politics operate on the same level? The parliament can be purely representative. Ireland can get 1% of the seats there. But in the commission, we should have twenty-seven votes; one for each nation.
Can anyone enlighten me? Besides Germany throwing a hissy fit, why is this suggestion not on the table? It serves everyone best in the long run, it is the purest form of republican democracy I can think of and it would pass by plebiscite across the continent (except in UK, France and Germany).
Your Correspondent, calls for one of those bad trial thingies…
But the system introduced by Lisbon isn’t as bad as just giving us a vote based loosely on our population size? What I understood is that in QMV 55% of countries can only pass a bill if they speak for 65% of the population, but by the same token, 65% of the population can only pass a bill if they speak for 55% of the countries.
This seems fairer than the American system to me. The QMV scheme is designed to minimise the power that individuals in smaller countries have over individuals in larger countries, but since any solution to this issue will invariably increase the power bigger countries have over smaller countries, they require a higher population based majority than they do per country. I think this minimises the problem for everyone. In America individuals in small states have more voting power than individuals in large states. QMV seeks to balance this problem by allowing the individuals in large states to add their less weighty votes together to some extent, while at the same time not endangering a large minority in the form of a smaller state because they still aren’t allowed to vote by virtue of their numbers alone.
The only problem for me is that it isn’t really 65% of the population voting. It is actually a very small proportion of the population, in the form of government ministers, who speak (where it counts the most) for practically 100% of the population. OK so this happens in any democracy too, but in the case of a republic like Ireland, we vote our representatives in based on whether we think they can do a good job and then they organise themselves in order to govern us. In the EU:
1. We vote our representatives from among our number in based on whether we think they would do a good job of running our country.
2. Our representatives organise their own representatives from among their number in order to govern us in Europe.
We should be organising our representatives in Europe in the same way as we do in Ireland. Otherwise our voice is heard through chinese whispers. The EU tries to minimise this issue in that we do elect the European Parliament directly, and they are giving the parliament more power along with the council. I think the other three main governing bodies should share power with the parliament on every decision. The good thing about our representatives picking their representatives is that those guys are department heads in our country so it makes sense for them to organise the same stuff in Europe, but there should be a safety implemented. The Lisbon treaty has begun to implement this safety in that it has already begun giving more power to the parliament.
Also all European bodies should be completely open and should never meet in secret. Our leaders must be fully answerable and accountable for their actions before they are given the responsibility of greater power.
Once we have developed a safe system, then we can talk about introducing things like an army to protect ourselves from threats. An army is too dangerous a thing to have in an not-purely-democratic community, especially one headed by a man chosen by a body who are not elected directly nor are fully accountable. At the moment, the EU “government” does not speak for the people. As you say, their countries have been shown to be opposed to the decisions they have made.
That’s as far as I got in thinking through the treaty. I didn’t have time to look at it fully and in the end I voted no. Maybe I was wrong to do so because the more time I had to think about it, the less dodgy it seemed, but the fact is, any positives it held were something I figured out by reading what other analysts had to say and by my own mental effort. The Government were no help at all, just like in the Nice treaty!
Democracy is probably a bit of an illusion anyway because whoever we vote in will have more power than the rest of us and can possibly abuse this power, but I think we should try to make this as difficult as possible.
That is a *brilliant* comment. I really appreciate your viewpoint Jimlad. If I had come across so clear a description I would have definitely considered voting yes.
I’m with Hutton on this one…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/15/eu.ireland
“Maybe pro-Europeans can win Ireland’s second referendum and then, in 2010 or 2011, our own. But referendums work best for the demagogue, the dissimulator and scaremonger, as Hitler and Mussolini, lovers of referendums, proved. Increasingly, Ireland and Britain are heading for the European exit and that could portend further break-up of the Union. Pro-Europeans look out.”
bullsheeet man, bullsheeet!!
thought you’d like that