Fighting Irish
In voting against Nice the Irish have struck a blow against a federal Europe.

By David Quinn, columnist with the Sunday Times (Ireland edition)
June 13, 2001 8:55 a.m.

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.