That’s why they call it ‘democracy’

Slightly OT question: How much do you think voters felt obliged to vote No because they saw that theirs was the only referendum, and therefore the only opportunity for an electorate to stop the technocrats? That is, loyalty to a perceived anti-Euro demo, the reverse of your #2. And how legitimate is that logic?

Jared, AFAIK there were no exit polls done so we don’t know why people voted No, but certainly Eurosceptics from various countries made sure we knew they were depending on us. It’s a perfectly sound reason for voting No.

not even an mba: Oddly enough some Americans do take the view that since the Irish economy has benefitted from US investment, we really shouldn’t sound off about the evils of bushisme. It seems that Irish prosperity is 80% due to the US, 80% due to the EU and our own contribution is minus 60%. Shit, that may even be about right.

If I can be quite honest I agree with all that you say, but don’t agree that this line of argument is really abroad and/or relevant. If anyone is asserting that the Irish voters failed in some duty to vote yes, it is out of impotent anger. I don’t think it carries too much rhetorical weight.

Jared’s question @2 is more relevant because it was a real, live, argument put across during the campaign. My response to that is this:
The treaty is an agreement amongst soverign governments, their systems for ratifying it are not for us Irish to decide. Neither is it the business of Europe how we ratify it. The interface with other signatories is our government in Ireland. The result of the referendum means that government is unable not unwilling to ratify it. Now Patricia McKenna and other no campaigners seem to believe our ratification/non ratification is more legitimate and add to their arguments, that put to a referendum, other countries would reject it. But that’s not what we were asked at the ballot box. We were asked to amend the constitution to enable the governments ratification. Nothing more or less. That has to trump any consideration as to how other sovereign countries conduct their affairs.

My question, one I’m not yet resolved on is:
Feeling that the Yes campaign has not communicated to you what it is it is advancing, disregarding what may think of the No campaign, should the default position be to vote No and protect the constitution; or to recuse yourself because you aren’t really capable of deciding one way or another and a No vote is likely to have a deep and far reaching impact.

Let me add to the preceding that (as someone said) immigration was the elephant in the room during the referendum debate.

It was not mentioned in the campaign, but anecdotally I know half a dozen people who voted No specifically because they hate the sight of black or Eastern European immigrants now working many of the lower paid jobs here. Irrationally, they blame the EU for that. At its root, its a rejection of modernity and a wish for the tribal monoculture of Ireland in years gone by. It has been made more potent by the fact that the economy seems to be crashing.

Personally, I am nervous about a mix of Sinn Fein’s strident nationalism and that irrational xenophobia. Its a mixture that could cause real problems. Hitherto, Sinn Fein have never played the race card, even when they could. Its something for which they should be given great credit… but a new leadership might see things differently.

Replying to jared, #2 –
actually, my ‘No’ vote was largely motivated by a feeling that it was wrong of the EU to sidestep the Dutch and French votes against the constitution by reframing it as a treaty.

Of course the Irish can vote no, unless it is a North Korean election. While they are quite entitled to do it it feels to me like a pretty irresponsible way of using their votes. If I really thought there was a genuine cohesive grievance then fair enough but I am just not convinced that there was enough to justify the mess that it has created. Again if anything good would come of the mess–an EU more comprehensible and connected with its citizens then fair enough. I suspect folks rather take it all for granted and yes it does seem ungrateful.

So yes, they can vote no and I will always respect them for it. Just not very much. (I count myself half-Irish, BTW, and it isn’t intended [nor is it] a reflection on Irish people, just my feelings about this vote.)

I really think that it shouldn’t have been put to a referendum. A little more on this here.

There are two other reasons why the Irish might be ‘obligated’ to say Yes. One is the people who voted ‘No’ solely because of completely erroneous beliefs about the effects of the treaty e.g. that Irish men would thus be obligated to join an EU army. (If there were people who voted ‘Yes’ solely out of equally baseless beliefs, however, they should have voted ‘No’).

The other reason is that the prospect of joining the EU has been one of the best ways of encouraging eastern European countries to make progress towards liberal democracy, as Peter Preston in the Guardian points out, but a paralysed EU isn’t going to let any more countries in.

Kevin Donoghue @ 4,
I was under the impression that the Celtic tiger phenomenon was a result of Ireland’s own policies as opposed to american/EU interventionism. Having big US based multinationals open shop in your hometown doesn’t mean doodly squat about the US administration.

I guess I was just curious if anyone else saw any analogies re: “Ireland owes it to the EU to ratify” and “those Middle Eastern ingrates electing Hamas and Hezbollah and Iranian puppets”.

Sandy Levinson

“I tend to think that anyone who views him/herself as a “democrat” should, at the end of the day, support some kind of popular ratification procedure instead of the inevitably elite-driven legislative process.

No, what is really questionable–stupid might really be the mot juste–is the decision by the Europeans to stick with unanimous ratification; this, by definition, gives the least among the European countries a right of absolute veto, which a slender majority of anti-European Irish were delighted to exercise, regardless of the desires of the rest of the continent.”

toby @8,

Sinn Fein have never played the race card, even when they could. Its something for which they should be given great credit

Similarly, the local skinhead troops here have never beaten the bejesus out of me for being a foreigner, even when they could (possibly because I am such a very pale foreigner). I think they should be given great credit for that.

a third niggle @21: the glib use of “anti-European” here is inaccurate (as many people have pointed out – Irish public sentiment, whatever the vote on the Lisbon deal, is one of the continent’s most “pro-European” and pro-EU) and slightly chilling, as a harbinger of a kind of nasty Euro-McCarthyism.

Of course there is no “duty” to vote Yes, but it is perfectly legitimate to scrutinize and criticize the reasons for voting No, especially if many of those reasons are only tangentially related to the actual content of the treaty or, worse, are based on blatant misrepresentations and lies. I’m all for a healthy debate on where the EU should be headed, but such a debate can only be fruitful if we are talking about the actual matters at hand rather than voicing general grievances.

In the same vein, it is unhelpful to denounce everything short of a referendum as “undemocratic”. Rather, the normal democratic decision making process – namely, an elected government proposes legislation, subsequently there is a lot of public back and forth in parliament and in the media, and then it is passed or rejected based on a majority vote – should serve as a model for the EU. It is true that the EU has been lacking in transparency and democracy, but that is due both to the procedural need for unanimity and the lack of interest exhibited by the general public.

If we want to achieve a more political, transparent and democratic EU, a majority based decision making process as proposed in the Lisbon treaty is crucial. If we keep holding on to the concept of unanimity with national interest as the driving force, it will either be “the elites” doing backroom deals to reach a compromise or no progress at all, because it is illusory to think that referendums in 27 different countries will ever come up with the same result. We need to find some middle ground here and ironically the Lisbon Treaty was our best bet in this regard.

Intellectuals because of their training tend to think in terms of logical blocks or inferential chains and enthymemes etc; the great unwashed do not. Their thought tends to become crystallised in archetypal images which have their own validity but can be dismissed with an airy wave by the intelligentsia. Conscription? Where did that come from? Race memory from the Great War or what. Does it represents a reality viz. a pan European army, embassies and all the trapping of a giant federation or another ‘playa’. In what national parliament has this been discussed? In a situation with qualified majority voting however logical that may be are we not gradually as a small nation going to be drawn into the slipstream of old Franco-German rivalries? Is what I am constantly hearing on France 24 – Euro France led force in Chad a straw in the wind? Prix a discuter as they say.

With your dismissal of the (3) “servants and horses” argument, you seem to be saying that every single European country has got it wrong except Ireland, since those other countries aren’t holding referndums. That’s a rather arrogant position, to say the least.(I’m not sure what you mean when you say most countries at least require a “supermajority” – if you mean a parliamentary vote requiring something more than over 50%, I think you’re wrong.)

It’s not so self-evident that people should always have a “direct voice in shaping the political system they live under”. We’re living in a period of constant evolution of the EU. From a practical point of view, events have shown how impractical it is to have referendums every time a country’s constitutional relationshp with the EU changes. The referendum question is more one of tradition: some countries have them, others not so much. In the UK there have been myriad constitutional changes over the years that haven’t required referendums. There wasn’t one over reform of the Lords for example. This whole question of direct consultation is a red herring: EU treaties are signed by popularly elected representatives, after all. I’m not sure why that’s not enough.

The ‘as long as it doesn’t frighten the servants and horses’ argument.

Ironically, I bet that exact same reason is why people voted no in France and Holland in 2005 and again this year in Ireland, because they are told it’s all too complicated for them to understand and should leave it to the professionals and quite rightly distrust these sentiments.

They won’t get the chance. Ireland = only country to hold Lisbon referendum.

Unless you believe that people shouldn’t have a direct voice in shaping the political system they live under (or, like Moravcsik, you believe that welfare state reform etc require that people need to have the hard choices made for them by others), you shouldn’t agree with this argument.

Isn’t this a bit of an exaggeration? Absent referenda Irish citizens would still have a direct voice in the development of their constitution. They would be free to speak their mind in public, to petition their MPs, to organise protests, and so on. What they would lack would be the direct power to take decisions, having only the indirect power to elect decision-makers.

To put it slightly differently: I might delegate some decisions about my legal affairs to my lawyer. This wouldn’t mean that I wouldn’t have a direct voice in these decisions.

or, alternatively, of EU treaties?

To second what others have said, the idea that anyone thinks that Irish citizens weren’t entitled to vote in whatever way they felt was right appears to be a straw man to me.

Just having the right to take a certain decision does not make you immune from legitimate criticism if others feel that you have not acted responsibly.

For example, others might feel that when taking their decision Irish citizens ought:

(1) to have weighed the general interests of the collective project of which they have chosen to be a part alongside their own sectional interests
(2) to have acknowledged some responsibility for prior commitments made by their elected representatives
(3) to have ensured that illegitimate sentiments (such as xenophobia, as conjectured above) did not influence their decision

Note that it is not claimed that any of these considerations ought to have determined the Irish decision, but that they ought to have been given due weight. If it is felt that they weren’t, then that could provide justified grounds for censure.

I won’t say whether or not this would be fair. However, being a citizen of country (UK) which over the years has done as much as any other to sabotage the EU project I think I can appreciate some of the ill feeling that this decision will have caused.

(And to be clear I am not interested in getting into a general pie fight about the merits of Europrean integration. I just feel that the post and some of the ensuing discussion mischaracterises the opposing view somewhat.)

Shouldn’t this fact alone provoke pause for thought as to the wisdom of referendums? or, alternatively, of EU treaties?

Very well put. I sometimes have the feeling that the political elites of the various member states produced something straight out of their common Weltanschauung, not realizing that this shared worldview is in fact rather extreme compared to what ordinary citizens think. The result is a (mostly sincere, I think) plea of the political representatives saying that this or that treaty is the “best we can get”, the offspring of a lengthy negotiation which has produced a frail consensus while constituencies in this or that country reject it (often for contradictory reasons). What to do then? In analogy with the way nation-states were built out of disparate regions, I’d say “build a very concrete European project which is massively beneficial to the ordinary European citizen” (a European welfare system perhaps) so as to give concrete meaning to the European demos. Then ask this demos what it thinks.

Just to reiterate a critical point, again being ignored by those calling for\defending ratification versus a popular vote. Ireland’s politicians in general can negotiate and ratify treaties without holding a referendum, and have done so throughout the history of the state.

However, if any treaty (or indeed internal law) is held to affect the constitution they HAVE to hold a referendum. So, the decision to have a vote was not in order to replace ratification with more “democratic” process but in order to satisfy constitutional requirements. While people may then determine their vote based on anything up to and including the alignment of the planets, the simple fact is that any treaty that affects our constitution is by definition NOT the same as any other treaty\law generally entered into by the Government. The whole point of the constitution is that it can ONLY be amended by popular vote not by politicians – however complex the specific issues involved.

So the Lisbon vote is a perfect example of Ireland’s political and legal structure functioning exactly as it was intended, whether you like the outcome or not. Furthermore, all EU members who have dealt with Ireland up to this point are well aware of this constraint within Irish law and to get upset over something which Irish Politicians have no choice about is very disingenuous at best.

To lend some credibility to the idea that the vote against Lisbon was mobilised by genuine anxieties about real European issues you might like to look at this set of entries to his journal by a Cork-based lawyer. Clearly most voters are not this informed, but the fundamental reason for this person’s decision was not any particular feature of the treaty but a dissent from the pattern of institutional development this treaty would have contributed to. Link below
http://www.irish-lawyer.com/journal/

“since if everyone had such a legal requirement, the EU would be unworkable, as would any broad association of nations sharing some aspects of sovereignty.”

??

The WTO sorta works with each country having a veto.

The WTO sorta works with each country having a veto.

They don’t all have referendums, though!

“Some of the anger, however, seems to me to rest on an unjustified implicit or explicit belief that the Irish were somehow obliged to vote Yes in the referendum.”

I don’t recall anyone making that claim in previous threads. The Irish obviously have a right to vote in whichever they want. But others, especially if they are affected, have the right to criticize their decisions as stupid or misguided.

If my recollection is accurate, the people criticizing the Irish vote in previous threads were primarily voicing their disagreement with the standard view that the Irish vote is a great win for ‘democracy’ in the EU. This appears to be the standard way of justifying the ‘no’ vote. However, that justification strikes some as unconvincing. It might be helpful if Henry addressed that issue instead of arguing against invented claims that no one ever made.

#45 The point a few people have made is that no-one appears to have claimed that the Irish people were ‘morally obligated’ to vote a particular way. Reasons have been been advanced as considerations to which they may have failed to give sufficient weight.

engels, sure. Yes, I know you said it shouldn’t determine the vote. My point is, I consider the due weight to be zero. I concede this may be a point of difference in our respective political philosophies. I believe we can disagree.

Yeah, I get that the referendum was a legal necessity in Ireland, and I question the wisdom of such a law, since if everyone had such a legal requirement, the EU would be unworkable, as would any broad association of nations sharing some aspects of sovereignty.

Not really. The EU would simply have to determine what powers the member states were willing to transfer to it and learn to live with that. The problem is that the EU comes back every few years asking for a bit more power. Sooner or later the response was bound to be negative.

If some EU members want to share more aspects of sovereignty than others there is nothing to stop them. Their legislatures can even pass an Act of Union voting themselves out of existence if they want to.

Engels, I’m trying desperately not to get drawn into a discussion of the proper relationship and implicit contract between a citizen and their government, partly because I’m not qualified to pontificate on the matter. Nonetheless, your question as stated seems to appeal to some sort of universally-applicable support owed by citizens to their governments, which I deny. There might be a higher probability of your agreeing with your government’s commitments than your disagreeing with them (particularly if you happened to vote for the people currently in power), but I do not think you are obliged to give even a moment’s thought to supporting your government in perpetuating what you feel are mistakes, or overstepping bounds that you feel your government has previously negotiated successfully. If anything, you are required to vote honestly with your conscience on each issue presented to you, your vote serving as a signal to your government about the direction you wished it would take. No?

Richard, yes, your vote signals the direction you believe the government should take. But that belief should be informed by the commitments the government has made, even if you weren’t yourself involved in making them.

I am pretty sure you should give ‘a moment’s thought’ to ‘supporting your government in perpetuating what you feel are mistakes’ for similar reasons that you should consider keeping a personal commitment that you now believe to be mistaken. Having committed yourself ought to count for something, even if you ultimately decide that other things are more important, surely?

And #60 is too abstract try thinking about the practical consequences of a state whose people repeatedly voted down treaties which its diplomats had signed up to. Such a state would become impossible to negotiate and other countries would begin to take it less seriously in treaty negotiations.

So yes I do think that whenever someone–the citizenry or the congress or whoever–decides on whether to ratify a treaty the state has signed they ought to bear in mind that they are already provisionally committed to it. Conversely, when diplomats negotiate and sign a treaty they ought to have a reasonable expectation that it will be ratified.

Why is voting to support decisions made by your government similar in kind to keeping a personal commitment?

I don’t know about anyone else but I’ve been involved both professionally and personally in situation where some or all of us decided, “On due reflection, in light of more experience and information, we’re going to change what we’re doing. The people who made the earlier decision did so in good faith-” and this was in fact the case, I’m not talking here about dealing with deception or incompetence or whatever “-but we don’t agree any more with the judgment that led up to it. So this is how we’re going to go about changing our course.”

Voting against something seems as good a way as any to signal a desire to change course. Surely we aren’t obligated to, for instance, keep supporting slavery, opposing female suffrage, and seeking control over Alsace and Lorraine just because such were once commitments of our states.

Ray – It’s not, and I didn’t say that it was. What I said was that the reasons for doing so in both cases looked similar: that there is reason–often not a conclusive one–to keep to a commitment one has later decided was mistaken.

Astrongmaybe – Yes, I think it would apply to any commitment to a third party made by officials acting on behalf of the state if it later went to a referendum.

There is a reason to keep to a commitment _one has made oneself_, even if one later decides it was mistaken.
I could understand keeping to a commitment made by a friend, even if one would not have made it oneself – though there the reasons are very different.
But my government is not myself, and is not my friend. Avoiding some embarrassment for Ireland’s foreign minister… it doesn’t weigh on the scales. Not at all. And if it did, it would be a very different thing to keeping one’s word.

So Ray in the example in #69 you don’t think I would have any reason at all to keep Gordon’s promise if I personally felt it was mistaken? For heaven’s sake, there doesn’t even have to be a moral reason (although I’m pretty sure there is), it could just be a prudential one. Honestly?

missing text: the prudential reason is to make it more likely that your successors will honour the promises you make, in your official capacity.

But I now have the feeling that I’ve hijacked this to argue one rather marginal point at great length, so I’ll leave it there.

Ray, the diplomatic service had the backing of the government and almost all the opposition so you can’t simply wash your hands of the negotiations.

They were carried out by your representatives so either you’ve reneged on your obligations or you’ve done a bad job of choosing your representatives. Those representatives are not a technocratic elite in the DFA either, it is the political parties that are in the frame here.

Even had that been the case it would still matter what had been negotiated.

_…or youthfully’ve donna a badminton jobs of choosing youngsters repaired_

Why, I’m surprise thermal electrocardiograph theorizers leases workshop bungling of corrections megahertz baseband postcard.

ray = objectively giant-symp

I don’t think the cattle-market analogy helps much. I would go along with the idea that if you hire a broker to sell something you are under a moral obligation to give due consideration the best offer the broker can get, even if it’s clearly understood that there was never any legal obligation to accept it. There is surely an obligation not to waste the bidders’ time.

But what’s involved here is not like that at all. It’s more like this:

Taoiseach Biffo: Here is a treaty which involves giving up some sovereignty and we think it’s worth it.

Sean Citizen: If I reject it, your chances of getting good jobs in Brussels like the one Charlie McCreevy got will be impaired, won’t they?

TB: Please don’t think we have allowed that vulgar consideration to influence our judgement. We are mindful only of the national interest.

SC: Sorry Biffo, nothing doing.

I’m not sure Sean Citizen got this one right, but I don’t think he was under any obligation whatever to buy a pig in a poke. Which if we’re talking about livestock, is the kind of animal the Lisbon Treaty actually resembles.

I must say, to me the notion that the people are obliged to respect the wishes of their representatives, rather than the representatives being obliged to respect the wishes of the people, has more than whiff of the Brechtian “dissolve the people and elect another” about it.

There may be prudential reasons to give weight to the judgement of your elected representatives — indeed, I assume this was a main reason for most of the “yes” votes. But as for moral obligations between the governement and the people, my understanding of democracy is that they run in one direction only.

(Note: that’s government; not law, not nation. if the treaty had been adopted, people would of course have an obligation to respect its terms.)

The key bit is this

Ummm, no that’s not the “key” bit. That’s just one phrase which taken out of context can be used to construct an uncharitable misreading of the argument which I have expressed quite clearly throughout this thread.

For the final time: when voting on ratification you had a duty give consideration to the provisional commitments which your representatives had already made on behalf of your state.

Anyway the ratio of repeated misunderstanding to genuinely enlightening argument has now got pretty low so as I said I’m not going to spend any more time on this. Feel free to continue to accuse me of having made obvious “mistakes”, etc, of course…

Even assuming I voted for a party that was involved in the treaty negotiations, I didn’t tick the box on my ballot paper that said
“I promise that I will vote for the next EU treaty you negotiate, provided it guarantees me at least five (5) magic beans”

when voting on ratification you had a duty give consideration to the provisional commitments which your representatives had already made on behalf of your state.

But what makes you think “No” voters didn’t do this? I imagine that the vast majority, at least of thsoe who supported parties in favor of the Treaty (and wasn’t that almost all of them) did give that consideration.

As for your example at 69, it depends. If I were elected on a “No pancakes for Americans — they’re too fat already” platform, then no, I certainly would not want to be bound by the prior commitment. In any case, the arguments would be practical, not moral — the *duty* of government is solely to the people it represents, not to its predecessors.

Anyway, it is precisely because states do have an interest in honoring their commitmeents, that is so important to be clear when, in fact, a commitment has been made. If an agent acts beyond their mandate, that does not oblige the principal to retroactively grant them the authority they usurped.

But what makes you think “No” voters didn’t do this?

Nothing much, which could be why I never advanced such a claim!

So you’ve been going on and on and on about how person X ought to do Y even though you have no reason to doubt that person X is already doing Y? You’re a funny man, Engels.

Ok, one last attempt at a canonical statement:

Under normal circumstances, when anyone takes decisions on behalf of a State, they are obliged to give due consideration — but not necessarily to adhere — to commitments to third parties previously made by officials acting legitimately on behalf that State, even if they were not themselves involved in making them. This applies not only when officials set State policy but when citizens do.

(I’m not saying this claim is necessarily right, but the vast majority of objections so far raised to it here have imo involved misconstruing it. Of course it might not apply in this case but imo no-one has yet made that argument convincingly either. And that is my last word on this thread.)

… or in other words, we are “miscontruing” you as saying something relevant to the topic.

No, Lemuel I’m “implying” that. I brought it up because it is relevant and I find it interesting.

‘I’m not “implying” that’

“The vast majority of Irish voters have voted for a party in favour of the treaty within the last month.”

But since party-voting is a rather broad thing, that said very little about Irish voter’s support for this Constitutional change unless the main rallying plank was the Constitutional change. And my impression from all the talk about the government just woke up to the idea that it had to campaign to rally around the treaty is that it was not in fact such a rallying plank.

Lemuel, you need to work on your blogging style. Your are not really showing any understanding what is what is being discussed here, I’m afraid.

Lemuel, you need to work on your blogging style. Your are not really showing any understanding what is what is being discussed here, I’m afraid.

Oh, fuck off.

“Under normal circumstances, when anyone takes decisions on behalf of a State, they are obliged to give due consideration—but not necessarily to adhere—to commitments to third parties previously made by officials acting legitimately on behalf that State, even if they were not themselves involved in making them.”

Minor point – if by ‘give due consideration’ you mean ‘be aware of/consider the implications of’, then fine. If you mean ‘give positive weight’, then no.

Major point – the only commitments that officials could legitimately give in this case were to hold a referendum, and to campaign in favour of acceptance. Any commitment to amend the constitution would have been illegitimate.

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