If this is right, it’s astonishing news, and Europe will be pitched into crisis again. I can understand how Irish voters came to say No: as Michael Portillo said on telly last night, simply the knowledge that the French, Dutch and British had been denied a vote is enough to make you vote No. Europhiles may be frustrated, but only when people feel their view is being sought honestly and that it will be decisive – as in a general election in their own country – will they be able to approach these questions without a reservoir of hostility to leaders and their elite EU project.
How European leaders react may determine attitudes to the EU for years. Are they listening?
Brown says he’s going to ratify anyway, so the answer to your question is “No”.
Representative democracy (with the EU level enhanced) is good enough for me.
But the time has come to distinguish between the willing and the unwilling.
Honestly, Ralf: that attitude is so 1960.
The whole idea of the Future of Europe process, which ended with the draft Constitution, was supposedly to bring Europe “closer to the citizen”. The trouble is that the EU citizen, on the whole, could tell that that was never honestly meant, and that’s why not only the Irish but the French and Dutch voters, too, have rejected the direction leaders wanted to take us in.
Unless attitudes like yours change, the number of the unwilling will just increase, and the only way to signal that change is not just to say you respect the Irish vote (do you?) but to show by your deeds that you actually do respect it.
Respect flows both ways.
The Irish want to opt out of the Lisbon Treaty. I am less sure about what Ireland wants in positive terms, but they have to come up with suggestions.
But I find the express will of the vast majority of the present EU member states, manifested by their governments and parliaments, to reform the European Union, at least as worthy of respect.
Ireland may be followed by one or more countries (the Czech Republic? Sweden?), but the solution for the 21st century is to let the willing countries build a better, and in the long run more democratic, European Union.
The UK, by the way, is going to be an interesting case to follow.