Our small platoons have done the whole of Europe one big favour
Where I was wrong was in expecting the British, the Swedes and the Czechs to halt their treaty ratification processes. Officially, the strategy is to press ahead — buy more time — and address ‘the Irish problem’ down the line. So I admit it: I underestimated the arrogance of the European elites. I gave them too much credit. How dare the robbing Irish jeopardise the Eurocrats’ best-laid plans? Seeing the glass half full, though, we have come a long way since last Friday when the Germans, the Italians and the Croatians were all for putting the Irish people on a cattle truck out of the whole European Union.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister and a man who personifies bureaucratic bloat, was all for kicking Ireland out there and then. Amusingly, the polls in Germany suggest that it is actually Herr Steinmeier and his party who are heading for a good kicking. The Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, was singing the same tune: arrivederci Irlanda. For the record, he is an 82-year-old communist and, therefore, has a long history of being wrong.
And why such prominence for the views of the president of Croatia, a country many feel isn’t yet even fit to join the EU, let alone decide on other countries’ future membership? The referendum stripped away this absurd elite’s democratic mask, leaving it exposed as shrill, undemocratic, unequal and corrupt.
Who wouldn’t say no to that? Thankfully, saner voices now prevail. Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and particularly Gordon Brown, know in their hearts that ‘the Irish problem’ is really a Europe-wide legitimacy crisis. Who really believes referendums would produce a oui in France, let alone a ja in Denmark or a yes in Britain?
Equally, the Dáil politicians know that without the Sinn Féin and Youth Defence bogeymen in the no camp, Dun Laoghaire’s tender souls would have thought twice about voting the way they did.
While the parties’ blame game has been discreditable, senior statesmen were more thoughtful. Pat Cox has made telling points about immigration; Pat Rabbitte likewise on the state of the economy. But, essentially, last Thursday was about mandating Brian Cowen to preserve the status quo, or as much as possible (The British ‘out, out, out’ brigade will have been disturbed to learn that Declan Ganley, speaking in London on Monday, really is pro-European and a democrat, too).
The electorate are not fools. They know the days of Europe as Ireland’s milch cow are over. At the same time, they were not convinced much of a case had been made for deeper integration. Actually, the no vote and Ireland becoming a net EU contributor are little more than coincidence, a small detail in a much bigger picture. Why is the EU in crisis? Because it’s a victim of its own success. Its historic objectives have all pretty much been attained.
Take France and Germany. For people of Garret FitzGerald’s generation, overlooking a few democratic niceties was a price worth paying it if it meant preventing yet another continental war. But who nowadays, least of all in the younger generation, can even conceive of 1914 or 1939 repeating themselves?
Equally, for all its bumbling, the EU has acted as a remarkably useful forum for resolving differences between neighbours. In the midst of their orgy of paddy-bashing some people in Brussels last week fell for their own rhetoric and started claiming they personally had brought peace to Ireland. That’s drivel — but who can doubt the power of the inspiration it provided to John Hume and others?
Knitting economies together has given states from the Atlantic to the Baltic every incentive to make peace. And despite its iniquities, not least for the developing world, let’s not overlook the stunning achievement that is the common market. Other parts of the world have attempted to copy it; none has truly succeeded.
Hardcore Eurosceptics should not lightly dismiss either the job that was done in turning Spain, Portugal and Greece into flourishing democracies — or uniting Germany, for that matter. True, all this might have been accomplished anyway, but how much easier was it with the EU?
And while we’re accentuating the positive, can the former Soviet satellites all have been wrong to bang on Europe’s door demanding entry? Leaving aside whether or not the EU has been an effective counterweight to the United States — if indeed that were desirable — it has certainly been a much stronger magnet than the (practically defunct) Russian-inspired Commonwealth of Independent States.
Should this lead us to conclude that the EU has passed its sell-by date? Hardly. There are huge challenges ahead, not just in the environmental sphere, but also in terms of stemming Europe’s seemingly inexorable decline relative to the emerging economies of Asia. That such little progress is being made is down to poor policy choices, not flaws in the constitutional superstructure. Naturally, in the game of power politics, Ireland is a political flyweight beside, say, France. Brian Cowen knows he cannot, alone, call a halt to the ratification process. But after some more rhetorical bluster in Brussels tomorrow, Europe’s leaders will glumly have to accept their legal options for circumventing the referendum result are a bit limited.
The whole point of Europe is that might isn’t right. The Taoiseach might as well dare them to do their worst — although diplomacy dictates he will have to grovel instead.
AT TIMES like this there is always talk of creating a two-tier Europe — although no-one really knows what it means. Presumably, if France and Germany want to become a single country, that is a matter for them. But will the eastern states whose independence is much more recent than Ireland’s give it up so lightly?
There is already far more diversity in the EU than is commonly recognised. Whatever happened to the whole EU having a common currency — or else? That day is still light years away. Nor is there any commonality on issues like defence.
Lisbon or no Lisbon, are countries like Sweden and Austria any more willing to give up their neutrality than Patricia McKenna? Even at the most basic level, the EU still hasn’t even managed to get rid of border controls, let alone guarantee the right of (Romanian or Bulgarian) EU citizens to live and work where they like.
Instead of treating these phenomena as tiresome aberrations, they should be viewed as trailblazers for a better future.
For all their mutual antipathy, no voters last week detected in the Lisbon Treaty an agenda towards more centralisation, limiting domestic policy choices to an unreasonable and undesirable degree.
The ‘small platoons’ that great Irishman Edmund Burke spoke of did the whole of Europe a favour.
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