Ireland derails bid to recast Europe’s rules!

IRELAND - June 14, 2008 - 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 had played to Irish voters’ deepest visceral fears about the European Union. For all its benefits, many people in Ireland and in Europe feel that 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. 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 small as Ireland, has the potential effect of stopping the whole thing cold.

Reacting with frustration to the vote, other European countries said they would try to press ahead for a way to make the Lisbon Treaty work after all and would discuss the matter when their leaders meet in Brussels next week.

But if they fail, the union would have to find some other method of adjusting institutionally to the addition of 12 new members since 2004, a rapid growth raising difficulties the treaty was intended to address. It will also have to come to terms with the vexing 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,” Denis MacShane, a Labor member of the British Parliament and a former British minister for Europe, said in an interview. “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, referring to earlier defeats of similar agreements in similar referendums.

The Lisbon Treaty, written after torturous meetings among 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 whose responsibilities would include controlling the development aid that the union distributes.

The treaty would also reduce the size of the European Commission, the union’s executive body, rotating the seats so that each member country would have a seat in 10 out of every 15 years. And it would change the voting procedures on the European Council, made up of Europe’s heads of state and government, so that fewer decisions would require unanimous votes.

Pointing to the union’s success in providing a democratic and economic anchor for post-Communist countries after the fall of the Soviet Union, supporters of the treaty argued that its passage was essential to making the expanded Europe more efficient and democratic.

Andrew Duff, a British member of the European Parliament and the Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues, said that the treaty’s defeat had been a “tragedy” for the grand project that is the European Union.

“The problems the treaty was established to address are still there: effectiveness, democracy and the capacity to act,” he said in an interview. Referring to the 2001 Nice Treaty, which last reorganized the way the union functions, 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.”

It is unclear what exactly will happen next. Ireland is the only country to put the Lisbon Treaty to a referendum, as its law requires. In general, such treaties are far more popular with Europe’s leaders than with its voters, and most governments are reluctant to risk the uncertainty of a national vote.

The other 26 countries in the European Union are considering it through their legislatures and executives, and 18 have approved it so far.

Around Europe, pro-treaty officials reacted to the vote with a collective brave face, vowing to forge ahead with the Lisbon Treaty despite Friday’s possibly fatal setback.

In 2001, Ireland initially rejected the Nice Treaty in a similar referendum to the one on Friday, but was prevailed upon to change its mind in a second referendum the next year.

There is no suggestion yet that that might happen again. But in Brussels, the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said he believed that the treaty was still “alive.” In Paris, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, France’s minister for European affairs, said that “the most important thing is that the ratification process must continue in the other countries, and then we shall see with the Irish what type of legal arrangement could be found.”

Mr. Jouyet told LCI television that Europe could not eject Ireland from the Union, but added, rather ominously, “But we can find specific means of cooperation.”

In Britain, government officials said that they would continue the process of ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, which is currently wending its way through Parliament. But there are deep strains of anti-European sentiment there, and the treaty’s defeat in Ireland lends new momentum to the campaign against it.

“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 a slightly altered version of the failed 2005 European Union constitution.

And Britain’s opposition Conservative Party said that it would be the “height of arrogance” and an insult to public opinion for the government to forge ahead with the treaty now.

“People in Ireland have sent the clearest possible message that they do not want this treaty, they do not want this constitution, and by all rights now it should be declared dead,” said David Cameron, the Conservative leader. “I think the elites in Brussels have got to listen to people in Europe who do not want endless powers being passed from nation-states to Brussels.”

In Ireland, the failure of the referendum was a crushing blow to the pro-treaty Irish establishment, including the major political parties and most business groups, which had worked hard for a yes vote. But the campaigners against the treaty mobilized under the efficient 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 voters’ rejection of it would force the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, to renegotiate its terms and secure a “better deal.”

“We want a Europe that is more democratic, and if there is to be a president and a foreign affairs minister, they should be elected,” he said in an interview.

Ireland has been one of Europe’s success stories, transforming itself with the help of billions of dollars from the European Union that began pouring in during the late 1980s. But it now finds itself in the less happy position of having to help finance the newer, and poorer, countries who have recently joined the union.

“There was no money for Ireland in voting ‘yes,’ ” said Michael Marsh, a professor of comparative political behavior at Trinity College in Dublin.

Experts on Ireland’s relationship with Europe said that the country was not anti-Europe, just against European institutions it found to be shadowy and remote.

Opponents of the treaty, then, were able to capitalize on voters’ confusion about the treaty and feelings of alienation from the political entity 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,” Mr. Bruter said in an interview, speaking of the Irish voters. “They just don’t want to give Europe a blank check anymore.”