Globalization backlash: Europe thrown into political chaos as Irish voters reject EU treaty--poke fingers in bossy Brussels eye
Sarah Lyall and Stephen Castle, iht.com
June 13, 2008
Europe was thrown into political chaos Friday by Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, a painstakingly negotiated blueprint for consolidating the European Union's power and streamlining its increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy.
The defeat of the treaty, by a vote of 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent, was the result of a highly organized campaign. For all its benefits, many people feel, the Union is remote, undemocratic and ever more inclined to strip its smaller members of the right to make their own laws and decide their own futures.
Although the Irish are less than 1 percent of the EU population of almost 500 million, the repercussions of the vote Thursday - whose results were announced Friday - are enormous. To take effect, the treaty must be ratified by all 27 members of the EU. So the defeat by a single country, even one as tiny as Ireland, has the potential effect of stopping the whole thing cold.
Reacting with frustration Friday, other European countries said they would try to press ahead for a plan to make the Lisbon Treaty work after all and would discuss the matter when EU leaders gathered for a summit meeting in Brussels next week.
But if they fail, the Union will have to find some other way of adjusting institutionally to the addition of 12 new members since 2004, a rapid growth that the treaty was designed to address.
It will also have to come to terms with the unpleasant reality that, as important as the Union is to their daily lives, many ordinary Europeans still feel alienated from it and confused by how it works.
"Europe as an idea does not provoke passionate support among ordinary citizens," said Denis MacShane, a Labour member of the British Parliament and a former minister for Europe.
"They see a bossy Brussels, and when they have the chance of a referendum in France, the Netherlands or Ireland to give their government and Europe a kick, they put the boot in," he added in an interview, referring to the French and Dutch rejections of a proposed European constitution in similar referendums three years ago.
The Lisbon Treaty, dense and complex, was the response to those French and Dutch defeats. If enacted, it would give Europe its first full-time president and create a new foreign policy chief who, among other things, would control EU development aid.
The treaty would also reduce the number of members on the European Commission, the EU's executive body, rotating the seats so that each member country would sit on the commission 10 out of every 15 years. It would change the voting procedures so that fewer decisions would require majority votes.
Ireland is the only country voting on the treaty in a referendum, as it is required by law to do; the other 26 countries are considering it through their legislatures and executives.
In Ireland, the failure of the referendum was a crushing blow to most of the Irish establishment, including the major political parties and most business groups, which had worked for a yes vote.
But campaigners for a no vote mobilized under the efficient leadership of Declan Ganley, a businessman who argued that the treaty took power away from Ireland.
Ganley, who formed the group Libertas to campaign against the treaty, said that the vote would force the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, to renegotiate the treaty and secure a "better deal."
"We want a Europe that is more democratic, and that if there is to be a president and a foreign affairs minister, they should be elected," he said in an interview.
Libertas and other opponents of the treaty capitalized on voters' feelings of alienation from the institutions of Europe, which is the source of about 85 percent of the new laws passed in Europe every year, said Michael Bruter, a senior lecturer in political science at the London School of Economics. |
