Debt of Gratitude: The Meaning of ‘No!’ in Irish

Why an Irish “No!” does not mean “No.”

Amid the whooping of campaigners and the sound of jaws dropping around the chancelleries and boardrooms of Europe, the returning officer delivered the verdict that should never have come. Despite the warnings, the thinly veiled threats, and attempts at blackmail, the Irish electorate rejected the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty in a vote of 54 to 46 percent. In practice this gave the no campaign a majority of more than 100,000 on a turnout of more than 1.5 million.

This unexpected rejection has triggered a wave of panic amongst EU and national political elites, with politicians and commentators falling over themselves to proclaim the dangers of rejecting Europe and seeking to brand this as anything other than a rejection of the Lisbon Treaty itself. The furore in the aftermath of the vote and the differing reactions to it are illustrative of the machinations of power within the EU and its member states and raise many larger issues, which are of significance to us all.

Phoenix from the Flames
The Lisbon Treaty came into being as a result of the hard won compromise, driven by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which enabled the EU to salvage something from the wreckage of the EU Constitution which was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. The treaty, like its more grandly titled predecessor, sought to restructure and reinvigorate the EU’s institutions and streamline its decision-making processes. It was hoped that this would enable the EU to function better, giving it the appropriate tools to manage its affairs with 27 members, rather than struggling to cope with its existing institutions and rules, many of which had been designed when it had six members.

The key provisions of the treaty included the creation of a permanent president of the EU council, serving for two and a half years, rather than the current system of rotating six-month presidencies among the member states; the creation of a position equivalent to that of a Foreign Minister or Secretary of State, that would combine the roles currently filled by “High Representative” Javier Solana and the Directorate General for External Relations, Commissioner Benita Ferrero Waldner, in the Council and the Commission respectively; and harmonising all the EU’s previous treaties (Rome, Maastricht, etc.) into one, thus creating a simpler and more transparent foundation for the working of the Union.

The Lisbon Treaty aimed to provide greater legitimacy for the EU by giving a more substantial role to the European Parliament as well as to the parliaments of member states. Crucial elements also included the enshrining of the Charter of Fundamental Rights in EU law and the removal of national vetoes in several areas, to speed up decision-making. Crucially, the treaty needed to be approved unanimously, requiring all 27 EU member states to ratify it through their own national mechanisms. Ireland is the only country in the Union where this process legally requires that a referendum be held.

None of this seems like earth-shatteringly controversial stuff, rather, just bureaucratic tidying, so what happened to make the Irish vote “No!” so decisively?

Hostage to their own fortune
Before the referendum, many commentators and politicians had focused on, or taken comfort in, the idea that Ireland, as one the countries perceived to have benefited most from membership of the European Union, should not reject the treaty. Commentators in The Independent (UK) and The Globe & Mail (Canada) focused on the more than 30 billion Euros that the Irish have received in subsidies, the emergence of Ireland from the UK’s shadow and the way that Ireland has taken a place on the world stage, supposedly as a result of its EU membership. The Financial Times (UK) summed up these arguments when it stated that:

‘It seems extraordinary that the Irish could be so apparently ungrateful.’

The Irish referendum has shown that, despite the best efforts of the Euro elite, bribery is not always enough to get your way, even when it is combined with bullying. The French Foreign Minister Bernhard Kouchner, founder of Medicins sans Frontieres and no stranger to trying to bend other countries’ governments to his will warned darkly that the Irish would be the “first victims” if they voted no.

Both during the campaign and in the aftermath of the “No!” vote, attempts have been made to portray the “No!” campaign as an unholy alliance of nutjobs and fundamentalists of one kind or another. As the acclaimed novelist Colm Toibin put it when writing in The Guardian, “The Lisbon Treaty was a gift for every crank in Ireland.” The UK’s former Europe Minister, Denis MacShane, chose to play on British fears and prejudices by emphasising the role of Sinn Fein (for long the political wing of the IRA) and the Socialist Workers Party.

In many of Europe’s corridors of power, the immediate reaction to the result was to pretend that it hadn’t happened and essentially did not matter. Commission President José Manuel Baroso insisted that the ratification process should continue in the countries that had not yet rubber stamped the treaty, including the Czech Republic. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated: “We’re sticking firmly to our goal of putting this treaty into effect.”

However, as the scale of the rejection became clear, and with growing acceptance that this result may have been repeated had other countries held referendums, a different approach began to emerge.

Imitating the reaction of Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg and an ardent federalist, to the French and Dutch “no” votes in 2005, it became paramount to state that the Irish had rejected many things, but not the treaty itself.

A Guardian editorial noted that the Irish government “allowed the Lisbon treaty to become a hostage to general public discontent,” implying that the recent upheavals in Irish domestic politics and dissatisfaction with the Irish political elite were to blame for the “no” vote, rather than the content of the treaty itself. This is the same tune that was played after the French “no” vote in 2005.

Further echoes of the last EU train wreck can be heard in another set of arguments that has tried to brand the Irish voter, described by one commentator as “any clown with a pen,” as incapable of understanding the treaty and the “No!” vote as being an endorsement of their own ignorance. The Financial Times combined these two points, arguing that:

“Putting the Treaty to such a plebiscite is absurd, [since many Irish voters] will vote ‘No’ simply because they do not understand the Treaty [and] others want to register a protest against the political establishment that is all on the ‘Yes’ side.”


Smearing the “No!” Campaign
The British commentator and former Blair confidante Will Hutton went further, alleging that the “No!” campaign was based on lies and that the treaty actually went a long way to addressing voters’ concerns. Surely if this was the case then the “Yes” campaign, backed by all four major Irish political parties and the bulk of the mainstream media, should have been able to expose the lies and set the record straight. That they were unable to do this reveals two key points.

Firstly, it should be noted that the treaty – almost 300 pages of dense Brusselese – was not an easy document to sell and even Irish PM Brian Cowen admitted he had not read it all. This certainly did leave aspects of the treaty open to interpretation and to speculation on issues such as abortion, conscription to any future European army, and tax harmonisation. While the treaty did not deal with these issues directly and Ireland, along with the UK, had already obtained ‘opt-outs’ on many parts of the treaty, these issues were given potency by the new arrangements on voting rights.

The loss of the right of veto on many issues, along with other trends in European governance, thrust the role of the EU’s smaller member states into the spotlight. It was this issue that gave credence to the more far-fetched, often exaggerated concerns expressed above. Whereas Ireland would not have been affected in those areas for now, nothing would prevent them from coming to pass in future. It was no longer good enough for the Irish political elite to hope that, in the words of Valery Giscard D’Estaing (former French President and architect of the failed Constitution),

“Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly.”

Secondly, there are many underlying concerns about the grey areas in the treaty, many of which relate to another agreement signed in Lisbon: the EU’s Lisbon Agenda for making itself the most competitive economic area in the world by 2010. In practice, this has come to mean a move away from the social Europe favoured by many across the EU towards a neo-liberal free trade zone. Left wing commentator Seumas Milne put it best when he said that the Irish government had been

“…unable to explain how the loss of vetoes, opening of health and education to competition, and undermining of workers' pay and conditions could be a good thing.”

Under the guise of administrative efficiency, the treaty does centralise more power in the Commission and the Council, while giving token additional powers to the European and national parliaments and further blurring the lines of accountability and responsibility. Crucially, the primacy of the freedom of markets, rather than the protection of people, is the defining ethos of the text, despite the inclusion of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Should the treaty ever come into force, governments around Europe will feel increasing pressure to liberalise markets and privatise what remains of their increasingly hollowed-out state sectors. Transport and energy markets are also to be prised open, while workers’ right to strike would be further curtailed.

No to Lisbon does not mean No to Europe
Another tactic of the reflexively pro EU and pro-business elite has been to try to paint the nay-sayers as xenophobic Eurosceptics, opposed in general to the idea of an integrated Europe, or to make them out to be reactionary hicks. However, in reality, while the broad “Church of the No!” campaign undoubtedly included some shrill and hardly progressive voices, the majority of its constituent parts went out of their way to point out that they are actually pro-European. They are simply for a different vision of Europe than the one set forth in the treaty.

While this may be hard to stomach for the neo-liberal visionaries in the Commission, it is the start of a reinvigorated campaign for a people’s Europe rather than a corporate Europe. This could also mark the beginning of the end of elitist efforts to impose Europe from the top-down, rather than making Europe from the bottom up.

A further key question raised by the “no” vote, with direct significance for the Czech Republic, concerns the type of democracy exercised within the EU. It has been repeated in many places that the votes of 1.5 million, with just over half against, should not derail a project that has been approved by the elected governments of hundreds of millions of people, including large countries such as Germany, France, and Spain. While it intuitively makes sense to say that if a majority of Europeans, spoken for by elected representatives, are in favour of the Treaty, then it should go ahead, this takes no account of the source of the EU’s legitimacy and goes against its own premise of being a post-power political organisation.

The EU gains its own legitimacy from the trust that most people still have in their nation states. It then provides a forum for these states, secure in their own identities, to transcend these and to cooperate on issues of mutual importance. As the former British diplomat and current advisor to Solana, Robert Cooper, points out in his book, The Breaking of Nations, the EU has always prided itself on its post-modern, post-power conception . If we have reached a point where the big countries, notably in this instance Germany and France, are effectively saying that this or that country does not count, and we can ride on without them, it changes the whole conception of the Union itself.

President Václav Klaus clearly does not agree with this point of view. After the vote, he stated that:

“The Lisbon Treaty project ended today with the decision of the Irish voters and its ratification cannot be continued.”

Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra agreed, describing the Franco-German pressure as inappropriate. So, rather than the Irish owing the EU a debt of gratitude for their advancement since becoming members, it is we, European citizens and residents, who are in debt to Irish voters for having given European democracy a shot in the arm and for derailing this elitist train.