Ireland votes ‘NO’ on the Lisbon Treaty

Good news today – for once – the EU’s ongoing empire-building project has had another major setback thanks to the Irish voters who stood up and voted down the Lisbon Treaty that would have shifted far more power to the EU’s central government and away from local governments. Here’s a few good articles that cover some of the basics for those who are just hearing about this issue for the first time:

Ireland’s vote on the Lisbon treaty: no means no – The Times Online

EU powers try to isolate Ireland after treaty defeat

Ireland rejects E.U. reform treaty: Victory or big mistake?

EU: Irish ‘No’ Vote On Lisbon Treaty Blows Hole In EU Integration Project

There are lots of other articles as well, check your local papers and if they’re not covering the story write them to complain. This is big, and people need to know about it.

This is a big deal for a few reasons. First of all because Ireland was the only country where the general public was allowed to vote on the Treaty at all, and that’s only because it’s in the Irish constitution that any treaty or law that would affect the constitution has to go to a popular vote. 18 other governments had already ‘ratified’ the treaty, but not one of them had bothered to allow the citizens to vote on it. In that context all the years of talk about the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ is revealed for the massive understatement that it is. Secondly because this is the second time the Eurocrats have tried to push through their ‘constitution’ which would would essentially convert the EU from a federation of autonomous political units into a single super-state; and -as before – in the only place the project went up for a popular vote, it was defeated. That’s huge.

At core, the entire EU project is an attempt to forge an empire capable of competing on an even footing with the United States, and rising super-powers like China & India. Europe’s elites know that if they want to be heard an an equal footing in a global order dominated by such super-powers, they have to put aside their differences and become one themselves. There are many side benefits for them as well – the ability to crush western Europe’s labor unions by exporting jobs (or even just threatening to export jobs) to eastern Europe, the ability for the corporate elite to make and pass laws for the entire continuant all at once instead of having to get 27 different countries to all agree to their new rules and deal with all that pesky democracy, the ability to use the EU’s combined economic strength to more effectively compete with and demand concessions from the US on things like agricultural subsidies, and so on.

The biggest goal for the people driving this project is to take power out of the hands of citizens and consolidate it further in the hands of elites. The new central government they’ve set up may have a Parliament, but that Parliament is by far the weakest of its branches. The real power in the EU sits with the technocrats and the committees, people who are not elected and not even remotely accountable to the citizens of Europe but are appointed through an incredibly complicated and opaque process. It’s something like what Washington DC would be like if all the lobbyists got together and just decided to run the government themselves while the politicians wasted time arguing with each other over trivia. They decide the laws and the terms and then once everything is neatly decided, they hand them off to obedient local governments that obediently endorse and pass them. It’s an altogether too neat and tidy process with only one flaw – every once in a while an actual vote is unavoidable. This week was one of those times.

In 2005 France was one of a very few nations that held a national referendum on the EU Constitution, and – to the horror of the EU’s elites – the French resoundingly voted ‘No’. That No vote threw a big fat monkey wrench onto the process and held up the constitution for several years. The Technocrats vowed at the time that they would press on regardless, and the Lisbon Treaty was their attempt to do just that. This time around, the France citizenry didn’t get a vote, their government just signed off on the treaty without bothering to consult them. Once again, however, a little bit of direct democracy was unavoidable and the Irish people were able to – temporarily at least – stop the treaty dead in its tracks. Not that that will stop the pushers behind the EU, they’ve already vowed to push on regardless and if they can’t find some loophole to force it through now they’ll almost certainly just wait a few years and then make another attempt. But, for now at least, the empire has been put on pause. And that’s a victory worth celebrating.

Posted: June 14th, 2008 under news, politrix.
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