EU negotiations outcome

Thanks for the tip, but what use is notoriety by a mis-spelt name?
Market competition has disappeared from the objectives (Article 2) but reappears as a protocol which says it’s implied by Article 3 – see page 24 of the conclusions. Still, it is a downgrade, and competition now ranks lower than say “cultural diversity” or “territorial cohesion”, whatever that is. Sarkozy has certainly revealed his statist colours.

A referendum certainly seems like a good idea for the UK, for the reasons Glyn Morgan puts. And since France voted “Non” last time, an explicit change of mind seems like a good idea.

OTOH, a requirement for referendums in every country every time the treaty is changed seems exactly the kind of thing that has to be given up as the EU grows.

If it were the USA, I would suspect that removing market competition goal would protect agribusiness. In France, I suspect it is to protect small farms. Le plus ca change,… (can’t find the bleeding cedile, sorry)

If the referendum goes the ‘wrong’ way, will it be held again until the political class get the right result?

Astute readers will have not failed to notice a certain penchant for score-settling and mindless repetition, in this poster. I’ve avoided mentioning the Economist, though. That’s admirable restraint.

And as we will see, it’s not like I’m the only one given to droning, concerning this issue.

For example, J. Wimberley says:

The real beauty of Merkel’s plan is the way it deals with the probable reason for the referendum noes, [the French and Dutch] learnt from the constitution for the first time what the EU was really up to and decided they didn’t like it. The defect of Giscard’s draft was that it was comprehensible. The latest plan is, following longstanding practice, written in opaque bafflegab; the peasants may grumble, but they can’t follow it enough to revolt

Have we heard that before? You bet. Is this, the “if you can’t convince them, confuse them” bit that has made its way into so many trashy management bestsellers, the only explanation that is advanced of the intricacies of EU decision-making? Sort of.

Is it woefully simplistic and for the most part just plain old wrongheaded? Certainly.

JW complains about how bizarre voting in the Council has become after the summit. But there’s no conspiracy behind it, only the manxome defence by Poland’s very own leaders of their “national interest” (which often appears to get mixed up with the interests of nationalists, but I’m digressing).

In fact, JW manages to avoid mentioning the Kaczynskis at all. Talk about being clear and didactic and all. Why mention the gorilla in the room when you can aim buckshot at the canny Kraut vixen?

There’s a pattern there. Encroaching federalism is generally far less to blame for the complications of EU law than the nation states dicking around to “protect” themselves by qualifying said law to death.

And you know, a person can only take so many ominous references to the insidiousness of the equivocating Eurocrats before she makes up her mind on the topic. After being regaled with the same bit of insight for the ten thousandth time or so, it becomes somewhat tedious.

As for the probable reason for the referendum noes, [the French and Dutch] learnt from the constitution for the first time what the EU was really up to and decided they didn’t like it:

says who? Will people practice what they seem to preach and stop trying to put a British spin on the results from other countries?

There were two clearly defined camps that favoured the no, both in France and the Netherlands. The nationalist right and far right, led in France by Philippe de Villiers (Le Pen cleverly chose to sit this one out) and in the NL by Geert Wilders. Those have never liked the EU, so the debate around the constitution was hardly an eye-opener.

As for the left, theirs was basically a vote of protest, often but not always quite vague, against the erosion of the welfare state. Add to that a healthy dose of mostly unwarranted fear of the new member states, and you’re set. But the opposition to an EU [that] has gone too far, too fast and without their proper consultation did not feature too heavily, really.

In France in particular many on the left expressed their disappointment with their “yes” vote to Maastricht, back in ’92 or so, which was not followed up with any kind of contrepartie sociale*.

They were voting against l’Europe libérale**. But their ideas on a political EU should have given your average Tory a case of the vapours. Some were so ambitious as to border on mania, really.

It can be plausibly argued that the Dutch “no” gave more of a snub to the idea of political integration than the French result. But it’s still very far from British levels.

[* & **: I’ve forgotten the italics. Please do impose a penance.]

The day the British decide to walk the walk and not just talk the talk

What is this the British to which Godfrey refers? Is it a small cadre of British politicians who have talked about Europe, an even smaller cadre of pompous windbags, or the people who would vote in a referendum, who have been stolidly and pointedly not asked their opinion on Europe (as voters) to date?

GG wrote:

“The simplest solution would be for those countries that want to forge ahead with closer integration to do so, while those that don’t can choose to stay out.”

That sounds to me like the best solution too, and it should be put to voters such: everyone gets a referendum, and the yea-sayers have the option of proceeding alone. That increases the penalty for a no vote, but also recognizes its legitimacy.

In a previous thread, abb1 put forth the old Marxist position that there are no sincere procedural ideologies, only sincere substantive ones. I’m a procedural ideologist. The EU needs democratic legitimacy regardless of the substantive merits. Needs it not just practically, but morally, and needs it absolutely. On the substance, I favor furthering European integration, with many caveats about how it is done. However, I think the procedural issue of democracy is more important than the substantive one of integration.

Perhaps an interesting ethical question would be this: if the European elite insist on continuing to push broad structural changes regardless of the popular will, does this at some point justify revolution? Is it legitimate to have a revolution for democracy per se or only response to specific grievances such as claims of oppression or denial of human rights? And, is the answer is no, was the American Revolution legitimate? Did the colonists really have any grievances that rose to that level other than having no voice in decisions that affected their lives?

Yes, I recognize that European integration is being done by elected governments. But democracy at a remove is a decline from the democracy that exists at the national level.

Now, let´s go for the standard balmy barrage™ of posts.

Martin, I agree, but with some important caveats

When you say ” democracy at a remove is a decline from the democracy that exists at the national level”, it’s obviously worth pointing out that an obvious solution is to increase the powers of the European Parliament.

Even more importantly, one shouldn’t disregard the odd systemic crises of national democracies. If we regard nationalism as a common outgrowth of nationhood (hardly something that runs counter to most of the historical record) and as an inherently uncivilised phenomenon, the question of the quality of democratic life and governance in a world where conservative notions of nationhood run rampant becomes inevitable.

What priceless nuggets of political goodness are we recovering from the deep pits of nationhood? The usual suspects crop up all the time: for example, Václav “Broadsides” Klaus, Howard in Oz, the Kaczynskis and their coalition partners or the Republican nutbar du jour have had their own threads on this site in the last two weeks or so.

The matter goes well beyond the occasional election of shitty politicians, disruptive and dangerous as they may be. A few weeks after the fall of Bhaghdad, I read on a right-wing Spanish newspaper, El Mundo I think, a puff piece about Aznar. Now, he was not the absolute worst of the paltry lot that has been in power lately, but he´s at any rate a pretty sorry excuse for a moustachioed panjandrum. The author, who seemed to have studied Latin for at least two or three years, went on about how “Josemari” had something that went beyond his potestas or legal faculty as PM. That something was more akin to the senatorial auctoritas, roughly defined as credibility, clout and general awesomeness. Now, I´m sure that Cicero and Mommsen were turning in their graves but, in a twisted mirror kind of way, he had a point.

Where does this meretricious variety of auctoritas come from, in our sorry times? Quaint stuff like body language and dress, rhetoric tailored to the hang-ups of local constituencies, the ability to zero in on highly-motivated fringe groups of the electorate that would prove unreachable to any poor fool who put too much stock in Lockean “natural states”. Under such terms, obviously, I want my politicians to mind their potestas, thank you very much, and to stick their auctoritas in whatever bodily orifices they may deem suitable.

I guess it´s all an overblown way of saying that traditional nations, particularly in Europe, are in no small measure ill-defined assemblages of cosmetic, insubstantial and/or noxious subject-matter, and that they provide the richest source of material for political confrontation that is based on “personalities” and not on the issues. Ergo, shit democratickin´all across the board.

The example of NAFTA in the above post is not just facetious, it highlights how limited mere “free” trade is in the political domain. Without the EU, a continent as divisive and riven with prejudice as Europe would undoubtedly have turned out to become a nastier place, even assuming that it would have been possible to exorcise the spectre of war. Without such a moderating influence, how much coarser, cruder would the “democracies that exist at the national level” have become over the years?

BTW, nationalism is hardly the preserve of the Right, unfortunately. In fact, in my admittedly limited experience, the many and varied flavours of the Left tend to cave in before it all the fucking time: the fusion of cult of personality and “patriotism” with Stalinism; the flimsy justifications provided by communism to post-colonial nationalism, even its less healthy manifestations; the fact that it is la izquierda Abertzale and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya that are at the forefront of nationalist sentiment in the Basque Country and Catalonia, respectively; the xenophobic streak in some forms of anti-globalisation or in the plombier polonais scare, etc. etc. The list goes on. Even the recent ongoing feud in the British and American left between those who thought that Slobo wasn’t such a bad egg and the Decents is on one level a dispute between two forms of capitulation to mutually inimical nationalisms.

On a purely practical level, for the foreseeable future we’re stuck with the status quo, and in spite of all the rhetoric, the British “elites” can live with that. The common market is far too big for it to be deemed practicable to leave it (i.e. they have outsmarted themselves on the enlargement issue) and, as magistra well says, at least now they get to try to keep the EU “bogged down, doing nothing” and perpetuate the illusion that the UK can remain in its Suez funk for another fifty years.

Je t’aime – moi non plus
Comme un vague irrésolue je vais et je viens entre tes reins
et je me retiens
Tu es la vague, moi l’île nue
Je te rejoins…
Oh mon amour
Non! Maintenant, viens!

The eroticism of the famous Serge Gainsbourg ditty is questionable, but the lyrics are a laugh riot.

I think I’d be more in positive favour of a referendum (as in, positively talking about it as something to work towards, as opposed to a passive sort of “yes that would be a good idea”) if I had any confidence that the media in this country (the UK) would be in any way fair and accurate in their reporting on the EU. On the record of the British press so far, however, the tabloids in particular would be full of sloganeering, distorted, grandstanding rubbish. The broadsheets haven’t been much better. I don’t think any side of this “debate” could currently say that the British public is decently informed on EU issues.

Yes, it´s somewhat futile to post lengthy responses. I love futility, however.

I disagree that nationalism, at least is all its senses, is necessarily evil…

Not entirely evil, “just” uncivilised, in this day and age. It´s a small but not entirely insignificant difference. At any rate, we can go back and forth on this forever. Let´s chalk up the disagreement to a different set of life experiences.

Whatever the case, nationalism isn´t going away any time soon, that´s for sure. Nevertheless…

without nationalism, there will be no support for the welfare state…The EU will work to the degree it creates a continent-wide nationalism.

This allows the biggest, dumbest fallacy of euroscepticism to sneak through the back door, surely? Doesn´t it lend itself to the oh-so-common suggestion that EU supporters are hellbent on creating a state and on creating it NOW, and that, in their wilful ignorance of the ugly realities of nationalism, they are dangerous or “messianic” utopians, and so on and so forth?

The EU, let´s not forget, has a budget that for any modern state´s standards is minuscule compared to its GDP. It´s no welfare Superstate in the making. Transnational transfers are already a source of some aggravation at this level (proving the general thrust of your point, one guesses), but as they are there´s no big pressure to scale them back.

[Except on the part of eurosceptics. You know, that contingent that happens to be very well represented in a country that otherwise purports to be the best ally of Eastern Europe in the EU. But I digress, and I´ll end up giving the impression that I dislike the denizens of that country as a whole, when nothing could be farther from the truth.]

In addition, you don´t need to leave nationalism behind entirely at all to understand as basic a concept as “strength in numbers”. That´s why popular support of moving towards a common foreign policy –one of the big dossiers the EU will have to tackle decisively somewhere down the line, whether it likes it or not– is pretty high in most member states. It does not require a big honkin´ welfare state either.

Remember, the point of my reply to your first post is not the fervent denunciation of nationalism and the attempt to call down the righteous lightning of the EU to strike down the beast: the point is that the EU, already in its present state and doing what it does, exerts a most salutary moderating influence on nationalism in Europe. Which in turn helps keep national democracies healthier.

Which is meant as a somewhat critical complement to your talk of “procedural ideology”.

i> I’m not sure you got me right

Wouldn´t be the first time. At the same time, bear in mind that at first I was only responding to a specific point of yours.

I’m in favor of a pan-European welfare state

I would be in favour of such a thing if I deemed it a realistic prospect.

The EU, however, is no state, and is not about to become one in the foreseeable future. With or without welfare appurtenances. The EU is a very special community of states however, and I´m in favour of making the most of such a unique polity.

Europe already has welfare states, at the national level. Contrary wo what one may hear in much of the Anglo-Saxon press, the different modalities of the welfare state you find in Europe are, in spite of some essential similarities, in critical respects very different from each other. Ask a Scandinavian about the French model, and if he or she speaks French, the word repoussoir i.e. “something we don´t want” will be used. This obviously makes the establishment of a “pan-European welfare state” very difficult. The point of the common institutions of the EU and of its comparatively small budget is (or should be) to allow to realise the benefits of a common market without hampering the nation states in the pursuit of their social models of choice.

It is clear that you´re no eurosceptic. Nevertheless, your apparent lack of willingness to handle the EU in its own terms –i.e. as the aforementioned peculiar polity it is– seemingly leads you to the same basic, generic considerations about nationhood as the basis of statehood that justify the euroscepticism of less progressive souls than yours.

I think the EU has been somewhat hijacked by the liberals (in the European sense) who got a strong central bank, and are pushing Europe away from its welfare state commitments.

Everything has been somewhat hijacked by the liberals in the European sense, friend. Most critically, national politics. More on that below.

We live in times of growing dissatisfaction with globalisation. This is something that indeed needs to be addressed, and even those who sing its paeans seem to get it. But, as of now, the opposition to it has been pretty scattershot and haphazard, to be perfectly honest.

The EU is a big, visible target, that hasn´t been around long enough to be quite taken for granted yet. It´s easy to assume it´s an artefact of globalization, rather than a complex polity that can be put to many, varied, actually wildly different political uses.

As for the strong central bank, it would be interesting to hear how you create confidence in a fledgling currency without a minimum amount of independence for the bank that manages it.

The alternative, BTW, staying with national currencies in the fraught times of global wage arbitrage and excess liquidity we´re living in, could have led in a commercially integrated continent like Europe to funny stuff, like proper deflation in Germany and hyperinflation in places like Italy (i.e. “competitive” devaluations that prove hard to handle), mutually reinforcing each other. That would have put the welfare states under far more strain than the euro. We´ll never know because we cannot turn back time but…just saying.
Most importantly, it almost always comes down to the fucking national governments. It´s not like there isn´t anybody who´s saying that the mandate of the ECB could be reviewed at this point. Sarkozy, that notorious lefty, has been talking about the issue since he started his presidential campaign. Guess who´s been telling him to stuff it? The finance ministers of the other eurozone countries.

It´s not only Sarko. Everybody and their dog in France, basically, has been griping about the ECB. I think they are a bit full of crap, but at any rate, where there´s a will there´s a way and they only need to garner support among their pardners…

Besides, there´s far more to the controversy surrounding the attitudes of the ECB than pure neoliberal stylings. It may purport to be very monetarist, but its idiosyncrasy, while certainly questionable, is not so easy to pin down ideologically. Much of its modus operandi is, essentially, a bad BuBa legacy. “Our mandate is to do stuff like the Bundesbank cause Germany did great under the Bundesbank and Kohl was very fond of the Bundesbank”.

Note that the Bundesbank never prevented Germany from having a generous welfare state.

As structured, I don’t see the same counterweight to business interests in the EU that I see in most of the members

Apples and oranges, mate. The institutional arrangement of the EU is not that of a state.

Curiously enough, most dyed in the wool supporters of (faux-)free marketeering see lots of such counterweights. They call them “bureaucracy” and “complicated legislation”. According to them, they are very prevalent in the EU. Funny, that.

the structure of the EU makes it easier to drift further in that direction over time, as the ability of the populace to compel the elite is limited

This is, again, vague and generic talk about the impenetrability of the “structure of the EU” and is, again, whether you intend it to be or not, a slightly refurbished version of Standard Eurosceptic Talking Point #6.

There´s a very simple mechanism that explains most of that “drift” towards liberalism: the notorious let´s-pass-unpopular-stuff-at-the-EU-level-and-blame-Brussels-afterwards scam which national governments are so fond of. It´s a bad practice that has become a bad habit, rather than a structural feature, set in institutional stone.

And, obviously, the continuation of the bad habit is contingent upon the political orientation of the assorted national governments. Inasmuch as national governments are involved in the affairs of the EU all the time, the people are voting on the EU all the time.

But stronger corrective countermeasures are indeed needed. Those are, as already stated, pretty simple: a stronger European Parliament, a weaker Council, more vigilant national parliaments. The EP is a place that tends to have a pretty big Socialist group, in line with national politics, and the Greens and other progressives have a very decent presence too.

As for I would like to see the Parliament strengthened, and the independence of the Central Bank weakened, and would be interested in the fate of a referendum that did those things.

Well, the draft Constitution shot down by the French and the Dutch, and the much-maligned Treaty jumpstarted in the last summit grant you at least one of your wishes, the most important one by far. In France, however, since part of the left was angry, still felt dirty for its “yes” to Maastricht in ´92 and didn´t feel like checking the same box twice, it sort of shot itself in the foot too.

I don’t see any new post from you, so I suppose someone took you at your word and had quite some will to delete.