Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

[Sapiens]

http://www.agi.it/world/news/2008061...n0039-art.html

(AGI) - Dublin, 13 June - The "no" vote has won in the referendum held yesterday on the Lisbon Treaty for the reform of the European Union. The announcement has come from Ireland's Justice Minister. "It would seem to have been a victory for the 'Nays" admitted Minister Dermot Ahern, live on TV "At the end of the day, for a myriad of reasons, the people have expressed their voice in just this manner ".

Seems like the Irish know what is good for them, not to worry, the bankers already are working on plan B:

European Treaty: Irish plan to get around 'no' vote

Officials in Brussels are working on plans to ensure that the European Treaty is still implemented elsewhere if Ireland votes against it in the referendum.

[Olduvai]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

26 to 1.
Prior to this "new" treaty France and the Dutch voted no. (70 million people)
After that amendments where made and now an Irish no to the new one. (4 million people)
EU will ask the Irish ; what's your problem.
Irish government will then ask the Irish public.
Result ; no clear answer.
Irish will ratify anyway.
27 to 0.

Or... , by by Irish and good luck.

[western]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

26 to 1.
Prior to this "new" treaty France and the Dutch voted no. (70 million people)
After that amendments where made and now an Irish no to the new one. (4 million people)
EU will ask the Irish ; what's your problem.
Irish government will then ask the Irish public.
Result ; no clear answer.
Irish will ratify anyway.
27 to 0.

Or... , by by Irish and good luck.

You were quick off the blocks there Sapians, The result was only announced in the last hour or so. Ireland was the only country that held a referendum on the issue of the newly packaged European Constitution that was rejected by the French and Dutch. The Irish Government are unable to make decisions that potentially affect the Irish Constitution without the consent of the people hence the only referendum held on this new treaty.

Irish voters were unable to understand the implications of alot of the technical babble in the treaty which was almost certainly by design.

So, with a healthy understanding through past experiences of what it is like to be a powerless insignificant outpost of a large centralised bureaucratic entity, a No vote was decided upon, Just to be safe.

Ireland remain in Europe and nothing will change in the short term, it was not an anti European vote but a voicing of concern on the direction Europe is taking.
This treaty will probably be reheated and served up again in a few months time with a bit of extra gravy.

[Chris]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

nothing is changed by this no vote. The European superproject will continue regardless of what the populous wants. Its "good for us", you see?

[Shakespear]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

Does anyone out there know some obvious issues with this treaty that would be understandable to the normal people on the street?

[Chris]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

Does anyone out there know some obvious issues with this treaty that would be understandable to the normal people on the street?

A quick read of this man's blog may be useful:

http://thejournal.parker-joseph.co.u...3/3673386.html

I will find a guide for you. The Libertarian party here in the UK has a very good one but i can't recall where at the moment.

[BlackVoid]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

They will rewrite some parts and put it up to vote again and again and again, until it is accepted. :eek:

[Chris]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

They won't even re-write it. Just look at the contempt these unelected chimps have for us. From the New Europe Journal (last paragraph):

http://www.neurope.eu/articles/87836.php

Referenda and Democracy

The EU has now accumulated significant (bad) experiences with referenda. It was very delicately yet effectively communicated by the Romanian social-democrat MEPs: “The referendum in Ireland has demonstrated that direct democracy (by way of referendum)cannot ensure the progress of the European process.The security, liberty and prosperity of hundreds of millions of European citizens ask for complex leadership actions, which cannot be appreciated by heterogeneous populations, from the point of view of the information level and the education one. European integration is a process that must be conducted politically by the elected representatives of the European citizens.”

Note that most European countries DO NOT elect their MEPs. Can you imagine why we don't want our (peoples of Europe) national sovereignty in the hands of these despots?

[sadsack]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

They won't even re-write it. Just look at the contempt these unelected chimps have for us. From the New Europe Journal (last paragraph):

http://www.neurope.eu/articles/87836.php

Note that most European countries DO NOT elect their MEPs. Can you imagine why we don't want our (peoples of Europe) national sovereignty in the hands of these despots?

That has been the European model, especially in the historically recent cases of France and Germany.

Unlike in the original (non-"interpreted") US Constitution, the concept of individual sovereignty, or the assumption that the ultimate power for governance resided with "the people," European experiments in representative democracy have virtually (<-- can't forget the escape clause) always been decreed (or acquiesed to) from the top down (e.g., England and the Magna Carta, German 3-tiered voting under Bismark). As such, this is a continuation of the most recent 150+ year history of paternalism from the European PTP.

[Shakespear]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

Thank You for the references. And Chris, your post makes a lot of things clear.

They do not want gov. for the people by the people. That is starting to be very clear.

[unlucky]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

They won't even re-write it. Just look at the contempt these unelected chimps have for us. From the New Europe Journal (last paragraph):

http://www.neurope.eu/articles/87836.php

Note that most European countries DO NOT elect their MEPs. Can you imagine why we don't want our (peoples of Europe) national sovereignty in the hands of these despots?

All EU countries directly elect their MEPs. However I doubt the author of this article is suggesting that MEPs should ratify European treaties.These treaties have the same standing as any other international treaty and have to ratified at national level in each member state.

Different states have different procedures for doing this. In all cases, ratification by parliament is required, often in multiple houses. Some nations, such as Ireland, require ratification by referendum. In other countries, referenda are illegal (Germany), or illegal for ratification of treaties (Italy).

The process of treaty ratification is always a mess, because of the different mechanisms used in each state and the requirement for unanimity. Rows about whose mechanism is the "most democratic" or the "most intelligent" often erupt.

The EU itself has no role in the process.

[rj1]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

nothing is changed by this no vote. The European superproject will continue regardless of what the populous wants. Its "good for us", you see?

To be perfectly fair, the U.S. government makes the same argument most of the time for stuff they do (and don't give me that bullsh*t about they're at least held accountable. No they're not, how can Congress have 15% approval rating and 95% of the incumbents up in November will be re-elected?)

This is what I've written before now:

In all seriousness, this just shows how unworkable a constitution/written document of rules is nowadays to push through for so many different groups. Even the U.S. Constitution was illegal when it was pushed through. The previous document, the Articles of Confederation, required unanimous consent. When the Constitution was passed, it only required the consent of 9 out of the 13 colonies. So the Constitution as originally proposed was an illegal document. However, the framers knew they couldn't make it unanimous cause people would always stand against it if they knew they could stop it for reasons of bargaining and negotiation. My state of North Carolina along with the state of Rhode Island initially rejected the Constitution, mainly due to the lack of a Bill of Rights. This was made moot when a Bill of Rights was added and then both states approved, but still, that shows the amount of horse trading that had to be done back 220 years ago, and the only people that could vote back then were white male landowners. Now take the EU, where everything major has to be unanimous, otherwise a country will get pissed off that something passed and their country was against it from the get-go, and there's universal suffrage with many people from a very wide degree of backgrounds.

It's a completely impossible task for Europe. Rhode Island had never fought a war against New York and they couldn't get along back then. Ireland has fought 14 wars against Britain throughout history and you expect them to agree on everything on a new document that binds both of them? It's insanely idealistic and foolish.

The European Union is too large for its own good. You can see this with the euro. Germany needs the interest rates for the currency to go up, Spain and Ireland need the interest rates for the currency to go down. You can only go one direction, and then people on the other side are going to get hurt, and then they are going to wonder, "why are we a part of this thing again?" I wish Americans would ask what benefits does our state get from being part of our union, but we've been together for so long that people don't think that way.

Note that most European countries DO NOT elect their MEPs. Can you imagine why we don't want our (peoples of Europe) national sovereignty in the hands of these despots?

It's a sad direction the world is going in. The established democracies are becoming more autocratic.

[Guest]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

STRATFOR contributes it's "two cents" (from Texas, with a far ranging eye on international affairs)
________________

The Problem With Europe - June 17, 2008

By George Friedman

The creation of a European state was severely wounded if not killed last week. The Irish voted against a proposed European Union treaty that included creation of a full-time president, increased power to pursue a European foreign policy and increased power for Europe’s parliament. Since the European constitutional process depends on unanimous consent by all 27 members, the Irish vote effectively sinks this version of the new constitution, much as Dutch and French voters sank the previous version in 2005.

The Irish vote was not a landslide. Only 54 percent of the voters cast their ballots against the constitution. But that misses the point. Whether it had been 54 percent for or against the constitution, the point was that the Irish were deeply divided. In every country, there is at least a substantial minority that opposes the constitution. Given that all 27 EU countries must approve the constitution, the odds against some country not sinking it are pretty long. The Europeans are not going to get a strengthened constitution this way.

But the deeper point is that you can’t create a constitution without a deep consensus about needing it. Even when there is — as the United States showed during its Civil War — critical details not settled by consensus can lead to conflict. In the case of the United States, the issues of the relative power of states and the federal government, along with the question of slavery, ripped the country apart. They could only be settled by war and a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution forced through by the winning side after the war.

The Constitutional Challenge

Creating a constitution is not like passing a law — and this treaty was, in all practical terms, a constitution. Constitutions do not represent public policy, but a shared vision of the regime and the purpose of the nation. The U.S. Constitution was born in battle. It emerged from a long war of independence and from the lessons learned in that war about the need for a strong executive to wage war, a strong congress to allocate funds and raise revenue, and a judiciary to interpret the constitution. War, along with the teachings of

John Locke, framed the discussions in Philadelphia, because the founders’ experience in a war where there was only a congress and no president convinced them of the need for a strong executive. And even that was not enough to prevent civil war over the issue of state sovereignty versus federal sovereignty. Making a constitution is hard.

The European constitution was also born in battle, but in a different way. For centuries, the Europeans had engaged in increasingly savage wars. The question they wanted to address was how to banish war from Europe. In truth, that decision was not in their hands, but in the hands of Americans and Soviets. But the core issue remained: how to restrain European savagery. The core idea was relatively simple. European wars arose from European divisions; and, for centuries, those divisions ran along national lines. If a United States of Europe could be created on the order of the United States of America, then the endless battling of France, Germany and England would be eliminated.

In the exhaustion of the postwar world — really lasting through the lives of the generation that endured World War II — the concept was deeply seductive. Europe after World War II was exhausted in every sense. It allowed its empires to slip away with a combination of indifference and relief. What Europeans wanted postwar was to make a living and be left alone by ideology and nationalism; they had experienced quite enough of those two. Even France under the influence of Charles de Gaulle, the champion of the idea of the nation-state and its interests, could not arouse a spirit of nationalism anywhere close to what had been.

There is a saying that some people are exhausted and confuse their state with virtue. If that is true, then it is surely true of Europe in the last couple of generations. The European Union reflected these origins. It began as a pact — the European Community — of nations looking to reduce tariff barriers. It evolved into a nearly Europe-wide grouping of countries bound together in a trade bloc, with many of those countries sharing a common currency. Its goal was not the creation of a more perfect union, or, as the Americans put it, a “novus ordo seclorum.”

It was not to be the city on the hill. Its commitment was to a more prosperous life, without genocide. Though not exactly inspiring, given the brutality of European history, it was not a trivial goal. The problem was that when push came to shove, the European Community evolved into the European Union, which consisted of four things:

1. A free trade zone with somewhat synchronized economic polices, not infrequently overridden by the sovereign power of member states.

2. A complex bureaucracy designed to oversee the harmonization of European economies. This was seen as impenetrable and engaged in intensive and intrusive work from the trivial to the extremely significant, charged with defining everything from when a salami may be called a salami and whether Microsoft was a monopoly.

3. A single currency and central bank to which 15 of the 27 EU members subscribed.

4. Had Ireland voted differently, a set of proto-institutions would have been created — complete with a presidency and foreign policy chief — which would have given the European Union the trappings of statehood. The president, who would rotate out of office after a short time, would have been the head of one of the EU member states.

Rejecting a European Regime

The Irish referendum was all about transforming the fourth category into a regime. The Irish rejected it not because they objected to the first three sets of solutions — they have become the second-wealthiest country in Europe per capita under their aegis. They objected to it because they did not want to create a European regime. As French and Dutch voters have said before, the Irish said they want a free trade zone. They will put up with the Brussels bureaucracy even though its intrusiveness and lack of accountability troubles them. They can live with a single currency so long as it does not simply become a prisoner of German and French economic policy. But they do not want to create a European state.

The French and German governments do want to create such a state. As with the creation of the United States, the reasons have to do with war, past and future. Franco-German animosity helped created the two world wars of the 20th century. Those two powers now want a framework for preventing war within Europe. They also — particularly the French — want a vehicle for influencing the course of world events. In their view, the European Union, as a whole, has a gross domestic product comparable to that of the United States. It should be the equal of the United States in shaping the world. This isn’t simply a moral position, but a practical one. The United States throws its weight around because it can, frequently harming Europe’s interests. The French and Germans want to control the United States.

To do this, they need to move beyond having an economic union. They need to have a European foreign and defense policy. But before they can have that, they need a European government that can carry out this policy. And before they can have a European government they must have a European regime, before which they must have a European constitution that enumerates the powers of the European president, parliament and courts. They also need to specify how these officials will be chosen.

The French and Germans would welcome all this if they could get it. They know, given population, economic power and so on, that they would dominate the foreign policy created by a European state. Not so the Irish and Danes; they understand they would have little influence on the course of European foreign policy. They already feel the pain of having little influence on European economic policy, particularly the policies of the European Central Bank (ECB). Even the French public has expressed itself in the 2006 election about fears of Brussels and the ECB. But for countries like Ireland and Denmark, each of which fought very hard to create and retain their national sovereignty, merging into a Europe in which they would lose their veto power to a European parliamentary and presidential system is an appalling prospect.

Economists always have trouble understanding nationalism. To an economist, all human beings are concerned with maximizing their own private wealth. Economists can never deal with the empirical fact that this simply isn’t true. Many Irish fought against being cogs in a multinational British Empire. The Danes fought against being absorbed by Germany. The prospect of abandoning the struggle for national sovereignty to Europe is not particularly pleasing, even if it means economic advantage.

Europe is not going to become a nation-state in the way the United States is. It is increasingly clear that Europeans are not going to reach a consensus on a European constitution. They are not in agreement on what European institutions should look like, how elections should be held and, above all, about the relation between individual nations and a central government. The Europeans have achieved all they are going to achieve. They have achieved a free trade zone with a regulatory body managing it. They have created a currency that is optional to EU members, and from which we expect some members to withdraw from at times while others join in. There will be no collective European foreign or defense policy simply because the Europeans do not have a common interest in foreign and defense policy.

Paris Reads the Writing on the Wall

The French have realized this most clearly. Once the strongest advocates of a federated Europe, the French under President Nicolas Sarkozy have started moving toward new strategies. Certainly, they remain committed to the European Union in its current structure, but they no longer expect it to have a single integrated foreign and defense policy. Instead, the French are pursuing initiatives by themselves. One aspect of this involves drawing closer to the United States on some foreign policy issues. Rather than trying to construct a single Europe that might resist the United States — former President Jacques Chirac’s vision — the French are moving to align themselves to some degree with American policies. Iran is an example.

The most intriguing initiative from France is the idea of a Mediterranean union drawing together the countries of the Mediterranean basin, from Algeria to Israel to Turkey. Apart from whether these nations could coexist in such a union, the idea raises the question of whether France (or Italy or Greece) can simultaneously belong to the European Union and another economic union. While questions — such as whether North African access to the French market would provide access to the rest of the European Union — remain to be answered, the Germans have strongly rejected this French vision.

The vision derives directly from French geopolitical reality. To this point, the French focus has been on France as a European country whose primary commitment is to Europe. But France also is a Mediterranean country, with historical ties and interests in the Mediterranean basin. France’s geographical position gives it options, and it has begun examining those options independent of its European partners.

The single most important consequence of the Irish vote is that it makes clear that European political union is not likely to happen. It therefore forces EU members to consider their own foreign and defense policies — and, therefore, their own geopolitical positions. Whether an economic union can survive in a region of political diversity really depends on whether the diversity evolves into rivalry. While that has been European history, it is not clear that Europe has the inclination to resurrect national rivalries.

At the same time, if France does pursue interests independent of the Germans, the question will be this: Will the mutual interest in economic unity override the tendency toward political conflict? The idea was that Europe would moot the question by creating a federation. That isn’t going to happen, so the question is on the table. And that question can be framed simply: When speaking of political and military matters, is it reasonable any longer to use the term Europe to denote a single entity? Europe, as it once was envisioned, appears to have disappeared in Ireland.

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to Stratfor.com

[western]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

An interesting side issue to the whole affair. The main opposition group to the Lisbon treaty in Ireland are called Libertas. They are not a grass roots organisation, have very few members and are very well funded. The head of Libertas Mr. Declan Ganley is also a keen contributor to the U.S Foreign Policy Research Institute. (FPRI)

From the Sunday Business Post 25 May 2008

Libertas says it is funded by private donations, which is perfectly legal, though donations above a certain amount will have to be disclosed by the group after the referendum. According to the group, Ganley and his wife have already donated the maximum amount of €6,300.

The group also indicated previously that Ganley was likely to provide extensive loan facilities to Libertas, to bridge the operating deficit while it awaited donations. But no details are available, and the group’s audited accounts for last year show that it had no activities. Last week, Ganley said Libertas had spent about €300,000 on its campaign so far, all of which had been donated by donors who wished to remain anonymous.

Libertas is essentially a small group of activists who work for Ganley. Last Friday, spokesman John McGuirk told The Sunday Business Post that he was the only paid employee of Libertas.

Two more members of the team, executive director Naoise Nunn and director David Cochrane (who also runs the politics.ie website) were said to be employed by Libertas, but had not been paid yet.

McGuirk said that, previously, the two men worked for Rivada Networks, Ganley’s US-based company, which also has an office in Galway. But Ganley said last week that there were no connections between Libertas and Rivada.

Rivada is a communications company, with contracts with US military and civil authorities. Last week, Ganley said it was ‘‘ridiculous’’ to suggest that Rivada had war-related contracts with the US military.

‘‘Let me be very clear. Rivada Networks is a public safety communications company,” he told the Irish Times. However, speaking to a business magazine in 2006, Ganley said, ‘‘We’re a hybrid of Vodafone and Lockheed Martin - a telco plus defence contractor.”

[rj1]

Re: Eu Treaty: Ireland Votes "no"

An interesting side issue to the whole affair. The main opposition group to the Lisbon treaty in Ireland are called Libertas.

So in other words they're a European PAC.