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Elites eu plans thwarted by irish vote { June 14 2008 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/world/europe/14ireland.html?_r=1&hp&oref=sloginhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/world/europe/14ireland.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
June 14, 2008
In Blow to E.U., Irish Voters Reject Treaty
By SARAH LYALL and STEPHEN CASTLE
LONDON — Europe was thrown into political turmoil on 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 margin of 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent, was the result of a highly organized “no” campaign that played to Irish voters’ deepest visceral fears about the European Union. 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.
The repercussions of Friday’s vote are enormous, for Ireland and for Europe. To take effect, the treaty must be ratified by all 27 members of the European Union. 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 to the vote on 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 their leaders meet for a summit 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 Labor 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 France and the Netherlands’s defeat of a proposed European constitution in similar referendums three years ago.
The Lisbon Treaty, written after tortuous meetings between all the member states, is dense and complex. But if enacted, it would give Europe its first full-time president and create a new foreign-policy chief who, among other things, would control the development aid the union distributes.
The treaty would also reduce the number of members serving on the European Commission, rotating the seats so that each member country would have a seat on the commission 10 out of every 15 years. And it would change the voting procedures so that fewer decisions would require majority votes.
Ireland is the only European country putting the treaty to its voters 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 hard for a “yes” vote. But the “no” campaigners mobilized under the leadership of Declan Ganley, a businessman who argued that the treaty took power away from Ireland.
Mr. Ganley, who formed a group, Libertas, to campaign against the treaty, said that the vote would force the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowan, 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 successfully capitalized on voters’ confusion, their disillusionment with the government and their feelings of alienation from the institutions of Europe, which is the source of some 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,” he said,speaking of the Irish voters. “They just don’t want to give Europe a blank check any more.”
Kick-started by Europe, which poured billions of dollars into Ireland beginning in the late 1980’s, 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 in the position of 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 the treaty, and attention now focuses on what those that haven’t will do next.
One of these is Great Britain, where the treaty is still wending its way through Parliament and where officials said on Friday that they would continue the process of ratifying it. But there are deep strains of anti-European sentiment in Britain, and the treaty’s defeat in Ireland lends some momentum to the campaign against it there.
“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, the 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 E.U. constitution cannot even win in Ireland — one of the most pro-E.U. countries in Europe — it is clear that their vision for the future of Europe is now discredited in the most fundamental way,” Mr. O’Brien said in a statement.
Andrew Duff, a British member of the European Parliament and 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 reorganize the way the union’s 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 reportingfrom Dublin, Graham Bowley contributed from New York, Steven Erlanger contributed from Paris and Alan Cowell contributed from Paris.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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