Europe conniving a plan

Before the Irish referendum last week on the Lisbon Treaty, all the reporting everywhere pretty unanimously announced that the Irish vote was so critical, the whole European Union depended on it to move its agenda forward. And that if the Irish voted ‘no’, it would be a deal breaker and the (already imperfect) treaty would not stand. In the final days of hand-wringing, on the eve of the Irish vote, the press said ‘the EU has no plan B’ if the Irish vote did not ratify Lisbon.

What a difference a loss makes.

How quick European leaders are to turn on an agreement. How willing some of the media are to spin new stories out about hasty plans to marginalize Ireland. Hard to find good and clear reporting on this. But here’s some, and it’s mostly correct and illuminating.

Irish voters were not rejecting the European Union when they turned down the so-called Lisbon treaty last week. They were saying no to a centralized governance structure for the 27-member club – and to the elite from which the treaty emerged.

That treaty, encrypted in 300 pages of jargon, was a thinly disguised substitute for the EU constitution Dutch and French voters turned down in 2005. As such, the Lisbon text was crafted to be impenetrable to the masses. So successful were the authors in obscuring its meaning that the chairman of the Irish Referendum Commission, one Iarfhlaith O’Neill, lapsed into embarrassed silence when asked to explain a befogged point during a recent press conference.

The part of this piece about not needing to sacrifice sovereignty or Irish abortion laws…..just a claim that was weak and suspicious.

Still, Ireland’s naysayers were expressing a healthy skepticism about the efforts of Eurocratic elites to put over a revised version of the 2005 constitution. A new EU treaty cannot take effect unless all 27 members ratify it, and those elites thought they could push it through by having the Lisbon treaty approved by compliant national parliaments instead of the voting public.

It exposed a “democracy deficit” alright. One that’s even clearer now that the Eurocratic elites are scheming again to go ahead anyway, and cut Ireland out of the picture.

The immediate question for Europe’s leaders after the Irish referendum rejected the European Union’s new “constitutional” treaty by 54 percent to 46 percent is how they will contrive to frustrate the will of the people yet again.

The grandees of Europe do not give up easily, even though their voters have a troublesome habit of saying “No” on those rare occasions when the question of Europe is put. The Danes, the Swedes, the French, the Dutch and the Irish (twice) have rejected the grand European project.

When the Dutch and the French voted against the draft EU constitution, Europe’s leaders repackaged its main components in the form of a treaty in order to sidestep the need for a new referendum. The Irish, however, have their own constitution, which requires any major changes to be put to the popular vote. Theirs was the only referendum, and they have said “No.”

That should be the end of the matter.

But the Eurocrats are behaving dishonorably, because they didn’t get their way and can’t tolerate a popular vote that denies them their plans to rule Europe.

So how will they fudge it? The first plan was simple: get the Irish to vote again until they give the right answer. That was what was done the last time the Irish said “No.” Some solemn new EU document that asserted Ireland’s right to set its own taxes and to maintain its official neutrality would meet some of the Irish complaints.

But Plan A foundered on the Irish government’s instincts for survival…

So Plan B is to isolate the Irish. The ratification process will continue so that 26 of the EU’s 27 member states will be committed. Then they will cobble the key bits of the Lisbon Treaty onto the new accession Treaty that makes Croatia into a full member late next year or in 2010, and get the Irish (without a referendum) to ratify that. Hey, presto, it is fixed.

Martin Walker makes a compelling point here that the plan may succeed, but “at a dangerous cost.”

Doubtless there were local reasons for all the successive “No” votes in the various countries that held referendums in recent years, but there was a common thread. The European voters are suspicious of their leaders, suspicious of the grand European project, and alarmed the whole EU process seems so remote, so bureaucratic and undemocratic in ignoring or fudging or working around other rejections by referendum.

And the Irish not only got to tell them so, but also to prove those suspicions were well-founded, now that those leaders are bureaucratically and undemocratically planning to ignore them and fudge a new ‘agreement’.