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Irish voters reject EU treaty
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 that played to Irish voters' deepest fears about the EU. 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' confusion, their disillusionment with the government and their 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.
"It's a pro-European country, but they didn't understand the treaty - why it was needed, what it was going to change," Bruter said, speaking of the Irish voters. "They just don't want to give Europe a blank check anymore."
Kick-started by Europe, which poured in billions of dollars beginning in the late 1980s, Ireland was able to transform itself from an insular, impoverished agrarian society to a European powerhouse with an enticingly low corporate tax rate and some of the world's largest pharmaceutical plants. But, having been the beneficiary of European money for years, Ireland now finds itself having to help finance the newer, and poorer, countries that have recently joined the Union.
Ireland is the only country to reject the treaty. Eighteen countries have so far approved it, and attention now focuses on what those that have not will do next.
One of these is Britain, where the treaty is wending its way through Parliament and which said Friday that it would continue the process of ratifying it.
But there are deep strains of anti-European sentiment in Britain, and the defeat of the treaty in Ireland could strengthen those feelings.
"This is a resounding victory on behalf of ordinary people across Europe over an out-of-touch and arrogant political elite," said Neil O'Brien, director of Open Europe, a British group that opposes the treaty and argues, with some justification, that it is merely an altered version of the failed 2005 constitution.
"If supporters of the EU constitution cannot even win in Ireland - one of the most pro-EU countries in Europe - it is clear that their vision for the future of Europe is now discredited in the most fundamental way," O'Brien said in a statement.
Andrew Duff, a British member of the European Parliament and a spokesman on constitutional issues for the Liberal Democratic Party, called the Irish vote a "tragedy" for Ireland and the European Union.
"The problems the treaty was established to address are still there," he said in an interview.
Referring to the 2001 Nice Treaty, an earlier effort to organize the way EU institutions function, he said, "If the outcome of this is that we are obliged to struggle on with the existing treaty, then the Irish have done no favors for themselves or us."
Sarah Lyall reported from London, and Stephen Castle from Brussels. Eamon Quinn contributed reporting from Dublin.
The New York Times |
