Ireland has rejected the Lisbon Treaty (as Emanuele thought it might), by a decisive margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. The Treaty has had a long and entirely disreputable history. It was drawn up to replace the draft European Constitution, which was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. The European mandarins were wiser the second time round: they claimed the Treaty was only a modestly significant revision of existing practices made necessary by the EU’s expansion into Eastern Europe, instead of a radical power-grab by Brussels.
This claim fooled only those who wanted to believe it, but it offered some very necessary anti-democratic cover. Instead of exposing this monstrosity to the scrutiny of the voters, 26 of the 27 EU member states sought to hustle it through their parliaments. That includes Britain, where Labour, having campaigned in the 2005 general election on the promise of a referendum on the Constitutions, used its replacement by the Treaty as an excuse for dumping their promise. The reason Labour did this was obvious: there was no chance the British public would have approved the Treaty.
Only Ireland’s constitution made this impossible: the Irish, therefore, were voting not for themselves, but in the referendum denied to the rest of Europe. In voting against the Treaty, they rejected the advice of almost every major political party in Ireland. Theirs is truly the voice of the people, and it is amplified by the arrogance of the ‘yes’ campaign: Ireland’s EU commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, admitted that not only had he not even read the Treaty but that no sane person would want to do so. The favorite argument of pro-European newspapers in Britain was that the Irish had a duty to vote ‘yes’ because they owed their status as a Celtic Tiger to EU subsidies, a claim that is as condescending as it is ignorant of the centrality of Ireland’s economic liberalization to its prosperity.
According to its terms, the Treaty cannot come into force until it is ratified by all the EU’s member states. But nothing is as simple as this. The normal EU solution is to tell an offending state to vote until they get it right. That is not likely to work this time round: the margin of defeat is too large, and the Treaty is so complex that even a nominal re-negotiation, done solely to justify resubmitting it to the Irish voters, would be intensely painful. But neither the EU nor Europe’s leaders–eager as ever to take power out of the hands of the voters, with all their inconvenient demands for democratic accountability, and put it in the hands of the EU–are going to give up.
The likely solution is simple: the remaining 26 countries will simply go ahead, ratify the Treaty, and put it in into effect, regardless of its terms. After a decent interval, the Irish will be asked to amend their constitution to make parliamentary approval of the Treaty possible, and then after a further interval, the Treaty will be passed without reference to the will of the people. But the EU is in a bind that cannot be evaded forever: by continually pressing forward, while repressing the evident will of the European publics, it is building up pressure that will sooner or later blow the entire apparatus apart.
