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 ast
Thursday a vote took place in Ireland that was little noticed in
America, but which could have radical and far-reaching implications.
Before the Irish voters was the latest in a long line of European
Union treaties, the so-called Nice treaty. Up to last Thursday the
Irish people had been among the most enthusiastic europhiles. The
Irish like to credit the European Union with the nation's extraordinary,
record-breaking economic boom. This is what made Ireland's rejection
of the Nice treaty by 54 percent to 46 percent all the more surprising.
Prior to the
vote, the treaty enjoyed the support of the main political parties,
trade unions, big business, the media, and the Catholic bishops.
And yet it was soundly defeated. What's more, it was defeated by
a motley, under-resourced crew consisting of Sinn Fein, the Green
party, Catholic traditionalists, socialists, and a handful of economists
and other academics, plus an even smaller number of commentators
(this one included). What we had going for us is this: We were highly
motivated, whereas the "army of the King" was fat, complacent,
and guilty of underestimating the peasant army arrayed against it.
People voted
against Nice for two mains reasons; they want to preserve Irish
military neutrality (something I don't support), and more importantly,
because they want to preserve some shreds of Irish sovereignty (something
I fully support). The Yes side never got this into their skulls.
They thought, and many of them still think, that those who voted
against Nice were greedy, backward, ignorant, xenophobic racists.
This is because they sold the Nice treaty on the basis that, unless
it were ratified, the countries of eastern Europe could join the
EU. Thus they assumed that if you were against Nice it was because
you were against those countries joining. And that could only be
because you were racist, or unwilling to share your money with them,
or both. In fact, I look forward to the day when the countries of
Eastern Europe can join the EU. But what I want to see them join
is an economic trading bloc — which is what the EU was when it was
still called the European Economic Community — and not a political
union, the kind of embryonic European federal state envisaged by
the Germans and French.
In such a federal
Europe the sovereignty of the small nation will be set at naught.
Had we ratified Nice we would have lost our veto over 35 areas of
policy now controlled by the EU. The way to enlarge the EU is not
to surrender the national veto over so many areas of policy, rather
it is to hand those areas of policy back to the nation-state.
If the EU were
still the much simpler EEC it would be much easier to enlarge it.
Ireland will be especially ill-served by a federal Europe governed
by the French and the Germans. To what do we owe our economic prosperity?
Is it really to our membership of the EU? Only partly. We really
owe it to economic liberalization. We engaged in massive — though
still not sufficient — deregulation of the economy, and we slashed
our corporate tax rate. The EU is anti-deregulation and the French
and Germans are forever criticizing our low level of corporate tax.
As it is, we are part of a currency, namely the euro, which suits
the French and Germans but not ourselves, because the Irish economy
rises and falls with the American and British, and not with the
continental ones. If, to boot, we wind up with a set of fiscal policies
that don't suit us, we will end up with German and French levels
of unemployment and economic efficiency. The real miracle is that
we didn't say No to the EU before.
What of the
future? Under EU law every member state must ratify a treaty before
it can proceed. This means the government will almost certainly
put the Nice treaty to the Irish people once again. If we say No
a second time then it's back to the drawing board. They'll have
to come up with a whole new model for the governance of the EU.
Maybe it will even spark a Europe-wide debate about whether we want
a political union at all. The fact is, only the Irish people have
been given the chance to vote on the Nice treaty. In every other
member state the government is pushing it through without opposition
and without consulting the voters. This is because in most countries
the people would reject Nice. In turn, this means that the Irish
electorate, in voting against Nice, was acting as a proxy for the
tens of millions of eurosceptics around Europe who don't have the
chance to vote at all.
From an American
point of view the outcome of the Europe debate is important because
the French in particular want to turn the EU into a geopolitical
rival to the United States, one that will pit its fussy, politically
correct, statist philosophy against the more free-wheeling outlook
of America. In voting against Nice the Irish have struck a blow
against a federal Europe, and whether they know it or not, Americans
have reason to be grateful for this.
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