The Irish No: what next?
I'm beginning to wonder if Europe's political leaders perhaps aren't very good at their jobs.
After all, they insist that the changes they want to make to the way the EU is run are vital. Trouble is, they don't seem able to persuade their voters. Not in France or the Netherlands three years ago, and not in Ireland last week.
Let's start by giving them the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that they haven't spent the best part of five years agonising over mind-numbingly complex voting formulae and textual amendments just because it's their idea of fun. Maybe they have a point when they say that the rules drawn up for a club of half a dozen don't work too well in a club of 27.
So why can't they convince the voters? First, I would suggest they haven't tried very hard. It all seems so obvious to them that it didn't occur to them that it might not seem so obvious to the rest of us. And anyway, it is all horribly complicated, so we probably wouldn't understand.
Second, they have been strangely reluctant to admit that if you're in a club with just a few other members, you're bound to have more influence than if there are more than two dozen. Voters in Ireland weren't slow to appreciate that if there's no longer a permanent Irish member of the European Commission, which is what the Lisbon treaty proposed, it's just possible that their interests may not be as well looked after as they used to be.
But there may also be a sub-text here as well. I remember in the early 1990s, when I used to cover EU summits as a matter of routine, that the UK government was always pushing for enlargement. "Wider, not deeper" was the mantra - for the simple reason that the Major government thought that if you could open up the EU to enough new members, then all this stuff about "ever-closer political union" would inevitably have to be cast aside.
As so often, the writers of "Yes, Minister" spelt it out with admirable clarity:
Jim Hacker: Why is the foreign office pushing for higher membership?
Sir Humphrey: I'd have thought that was obvious. The more members an organisation has, the more arguments it can stir up. The more futile and impotent it becomes.
Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey: We call it diplomacy, Minister.
(The full clip is .)
Those who have been arguing with such conspicuous lack of success in favour of the Lisbon reforms say that without them, the EU will not be able to take effective action on climate change, energy security, or organised crime. If Europe wants to be able to stand up to the US, Russia, China and India, they say, it has to be able to speak with a single voice.
But my impression from having reported on the French, Dutch and Irish referendums is that a major factor in the Non/Nee/Nil votes was a simple, visceral suspicion of Brussels. True, Ireland has done very nicely in the past out of EU development grants - but more recently, there have also been large numbers of migrant workers arriving to take advantage of a booming economy.
To many EU voters - not only in France, the Netherlands and Ireland, but also in Germany, Italy and Spain -- EU enlargement has meant more foreign workers. And they just don't like it. Nor do they like being told to vote for something that they don't understand a word of, and which political leaders seem unable to explain.
So what about Croatia and Turkey, and Ukraine and Serbia, all of which are hoping to join the EU over the coming decade? My hunch is it ain't going to happen. Which causes much scratching of heads in some EU capitals, where diplomats are convinced that holding out EU membership as an incentive to democratise is a highly effective tool of diplomacy.
Perhaps John Major was right: you can have a wider EU, or a deeper, more integrated, EU. But you can't have both, or at least not until you've found a way to persuade voters that their interests are being looked after too.
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