Hvilken betydning har det irske nej for fremtiden?

Fra Brussels Journal, af John Laughland

Well, I was wrong to predict a Yes vote in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty. I take comfort not only in the result itself, by which I am obviously delighted, but also in the fact that my friend and colleague, Anthony Coughlan, a professor at Trinity College, Dublin who is a euro-critical activist who campaigns tirelessly and superbly against European integration, sent round a pessimistic note on the morning of the vote (12 June) saying that he feared that the treaty would be ratified.

The EU elites were quick to tell the world that they intend to disregard the Irish vote and press ahead with ratification of the treaty nonetheless. They have demonstrated their brazen contempt for democracy and the law before. They did it in 2000 when Ireland voted against the Nice treaty (it had to vote again the following year); they did it in 1992 when Denmark voted against the Maastricht treaty (the Danes were also made to vote again until they got the answer ‘right’).

They did it in 2005, when France and the Netherlands voted against the Lisbon treaty’s predecessor, the European Constitution; on that occasion, they simply re-wrote the Constitution in the form of amendments to previous treaties instead of in one single document, and then agreed to ratify it in their tightly controlled parliaments and not to submit it to a popular vote. Ireland is the only country in Europe whose constitution requires referendums for new EU treaties.

The anti-democratic nature of the European project therefore becomes ever more grossly obvious. Speaking on BBC Radio on 17 June, a veteran German Member of the European Parliament said that 3 million Irish citizens could not be allowed to prevent 300 million Europeans from pursuing further integration. The dishonesty of this remark would be breathtaking had it not become so banal: the 300 million Europeans have precisely been denied any say in the new treaty. If they were given a vote, there is a chance that the vote would be No in Britain, Germany, France, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and maybe also the Czech Republic and Hungary. But the European elites specifically designed the Lisbon treaty so as not to have to subject it to public approval.

The Irish No vote therefore only entrenches the intractable impasse which the EU has been in now for nearly a decade or more. There is a particular and a general aspect to this impasse. The general impasse is that the European project is designed to take as much power as possible out of the national parliamentary domain and place it instead in the hands of unelected and unaccountable EU apparatchiks, and national governmental administrations. The particular impasse is that the enlargement of the EU in 2004 to include ten new member states, most of them in Central Europe, has caused the larger states to feel weakened because the smaller ones can outvote them. The tension between voters and rulers, and between small states and large, has been unresolved since at least the summit held at Nice in 2000, when the present voting arrangements were drawn up. That treaty, incidentally, was very nearly never signed because of opposition from Spain and Poland.

So what does all this mean for the future? On the one hand, history shows that seemingly unworkable political institutions can be made to work for a very long time indeed. The example of the Kingdom of Belgium in a case in point, which has been in institutional crisis for as long as anyone can remember. There is still no way out of the impasse between French-speakers and Flemings and yet the country continues stubbornly to exist.

On the other, such countries have usually managed to survive when they can project their internal tension outwards onto a foreign policy project. To see this, take the case of Yugoslavia. That country broke up not when the dictator, Marshal Tito died (in 1980) but instead the international situation changed radically, as it did when the Cold War ended in 1989. Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia had profiled itself on the international stage as the leader of the non-aligned movement. The bottom fell out of its world when the division of the world into East and West ended. Susan Woodward argues conclusively in her book, Balkan Tragedy, that it was this which signed Yugoslavia’s death warrant, not internal political pressures like nationalism. The same might be said of the Soviet Union. For many decades, the Soviet Union presented itself as the champion of “peace” and decolonisation; the attempt ultimately failed, of course, and indeed principally for foreign policy reasons. As soon as Gorbachev and Reagan started to negotiate to end the Cold War, the country started to implode.

This may provide a clue to the future of the EU. With the Lisbon treaty, the EU is precisely trying to find a foreign policy role for itself: the whole point of the treaty, just as of the now defunct constitution, is to give the EU a foreign minister in all but name. Never mind the fact that the EU states occasionally diverge on foreign policy priorities; the reasoning is presumably that, once EU foreign policy is institutionalised, it will come into being of its own accord in the same way as EU laws do once the institutions are created to draw them up.

The EU wants this foreign policy role because it wants a big project to justify its existence. It has done this to some extent already, channelling its foreign policy energies into the fashionable nostrums of humanitarian intervention (as in Chad, where there is currently an EU force) and conflict management (Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia). One of the reasons why so many EU states were keen to recognise Kosovo was that it gives Brussels its very own protectorate in the Balkans, a toehold in a region where historically the fate of Great Powers has been decided.

The European Union is evidently determined to justify its own massive accretion of power by a similar foreign policy project based on the projection of its left-liberal values into various parts of the third world. The project itself may not be especially bold, and even if it was undertaken, success could not be guaranteed. But now that the Irish have prevented the ratification of the Lisbon treaty on 1 January 2009, as planned, the project may never get underway at all. Under such circumstances, the longterm future existence of the EU as a whole is now more in doubt than it was before the vote.