The so-called Brezhnev Doctrine is at work in the European Union.
“What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable,” runs the
line. When it comes to the EU, any vote to increase authority in
Brussels is viewed as final. Any vote against consolidating power
is treated as merely temporary.
It’s the attitude towards Ireland, which in June 2008 voted to
reject the Lisbon Treaty. Since the agreement requires unanimous
agreement, the referendum theoretically killed the attempt to
expand the EU’s authority. However, the European elite viewed the
setback as only temporary and insisted that Ireland vote again.
Dublin will hold a revote on October 2.
The lack of obvious practical benefits of a consolidated
government in Brussels for most Europeans has not prevented the
development of a strong elite consensus behind Lisbon. Roger
Cole, head of the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance, argues bluntly: “The EU
political elite supports the treaty because it continues to
transfer power away from the people and their own national
democratic institutions to themselves and their institutions, the
Council of Ministers, the European Court of Justice and the
parliament.”
Toward this end the Swedish think tank Timbro estimates that the
EU spends several billion dollars annually promoting an expanded
EU. Lorraine Mullally of the London-based think tank Open Europe
complains: The
European Commission increasingly “sees itself not just as
‘guardian of the Treaties,’ but as a political campaign group.”
There are few dissenting public voices. Former Czech Prime
Minister Mirek Topolanek
admitted: “This treaty is bad and we know it.” But he said he
felt he had no choice but to support Lisbon: “If we hadn’t signed
the Lisbon Treaty and had been pushed to the sidelines of the
European Union we would have had no chance of promoting our
national interests. That’s the main reason. It was the lesser of
two evils.”
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are no more willing
than anyone else to debate popular dissatisfaction with a
consolidated government. Hans-Gert Poettering, the last president
of the European Parliament (EP), even
advocated locking out anti-federalists: “I think it is very
important that the pro-European MEPs cooperate well so the
anti-Europeans cannot make their voices heard so strongly.”
The difference between popular and elite attitudes is stark. An
Open Europe poll from 2007 found that roughly 75 percent of
Europeans — with a clear majority in every nation — wanted to
vote on any new treaty transferring power to Brussels. EU
Internal Markets Commissioner (Ireland’s representative on the
European Commission) Charlie McCreevy argued, undoubtedly with
some hyperbole, that European leaders “know quite well that if
the question was put to their electorate by a referendum the
answer in 95 percent of the countries would probably have been No
as well.” In fact, polls suggest that Lisbon would fail in about
half of the EU members.
No wonder former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who
played a leading role in drafting the original constitution,
opined: “Above all, it is to avoid having referendums.”
Twenty-six of 27 EU member states have approved Lisbon by
parliamentary vote, usually backed by both the main governing and
opposition parties. In Ireland, however, the constitution
required a referendum on the treaty. And last June the measure
went down to defeat.
Oops.
Although the treaty theoretically was dead, supporters assumed
that eventual approval was inevitable: the only question was how?
Ironically, the pro-treaty lobby, which had designed the process
to eliminate public input, expressed its democratic outrage over
the result. A British Labour MP complained that the Irish had
“become extremely arrogant.” Britain’s Lord Mark Malloch-Brown
grandly declared that “I am not sure whether the voters of
Ireland should have a right of veto over the aspirations of all
the other people of Europe. I am not sure whether that is, or is
not, democracy.”
Spanish EU Commissioner Joaquin Almunia claimed that it is not
“very democratic” to hold a referendum on complicated issues like
the Lisbon Treaty. German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble
declared: “a few million Irish cannot decide on behalf of 495
million Europeans.”
Some Treaty advocates proposed throwing Ireland out of the EU or
relegating the country to associate status. Most, however,
preferred to pressure Dublin to hold another poll, as it had
after Irish voters turned down another treaty in 2001 before
ratifying it in a second vote.
The Irish government has set a repeat vote for October 2. To
sweeten the pot, so to speak, other European governments have
promised several future concessions, allowing Ireland to retain
its national commissioner and opt out of a European foreign
policy. After the recent EU summit, Irish Prime Minister Brian
Cowen claimed: “We came here with two aims. Ireland wanted firm
legal guarantees. We got them. We wanted a commitment to a
protocol. We got that.”
Well, kind of. Last December Irish Foreign Minister Micheál
Martin stated that “we will not be asking people to vote on the
same proposition.” But what Dublin received was the promise of
future action, not present amendments. Irish Socialist MEP Joe
Higgins
acknowledged: the guarantee process is “an elaborate charade.
The so-called guarantees are simply designed to throw dust in the
eyes of ordinary people in Ireland to give them the impression
that something fundamental has been changed in the Lisbon
Treaty,” thereby making people think they will be voting on a
different document when “It is exactly the same text, word by
word, not even a comma has been changed.”
Similarly,
explains Open Europe’s Lorraine Mullally: “Despite lengthy
negotiations and lots of superficial statements about
‘respecting’ the Irish ‘no’ vote, not a single comma has changed
— if there were any changes at all to the Treaty, then all the
other member states would have to re-ratify it. None of the
statements made [at the EU summit] are binding in EU law. But
even if they were, they do nothing to address Irish concerns.”
Treaty advocates argue otherwise, of course. Given its difficulty
in selling the treaty, the Irish government is attempting to turn
the treaty referendum into a vote on membership in the EU. Jim
O’Hara, CEO of Intel Ireland, added: “People don’t understand the
economic catastrophe that could unfold if we don’t get a ‘Yes’
vote.” But few critics of Lisbon want to leave the EU. Since the
EU appears to be working as is, they simply see no reason to
expand the EU’s authority.
The betting is that Lisbon will carry the second time around. (If
it doesn’t, threatened one German Socialist MEP, Ireland will
face “isolation” and “second class” status.) Still, nothing is
guaranteed. British MEP Daniel Hannan writes of an Irish friend
who told him: “we didn’t fight off the might of the British
Empire just so as to be bossed about by the Belgians.”
Moreover, the Czech and Polish presidents have to yet to sign off
on the agreement and if the Tories win next year’s election in
Britain, they might use a future treaty as an opportunity to
demand their own concessions, à la the Irish. And if the
Conservatives come to power — which is as certain as anything in
politics — before the Lisbon process is completed, they are
likely to reverse the Labour government’s ratification.
Only the Europeans can decide on the EU’s future. Timothy Garton
Ash
wrote in the Guardian of “the essential grandeur of
this project we call the European Union, where nations born in so
much blood work together freely in a commonwealth of
democracies.” He is right, but his argument actually works
against the Lisbon Treaty, or at least the current ratification
process, which excludes the people forced to live under the
resulting government. Declares Roger Cole: “This referendum is
not an Irish battle. It is a European battle fought on Irish
soil, a battle between the peoples of Europe that support
democracy and the elite of Europe that want an empire.”
