Sharing keeps a nation’s identity
According to this definition, democracy means that decisions can only be made if 'I' agree.
Imagine a Dáil or the governing committee of any body, however small, in which each individual member had an absolute veto. Curiously enough, exactly such a liberum veto actually existed in the Polish parliament in the 18th century which was one of the reasons why the three old empires of that time gobbled up Poland and wiped it off the face of the map.
For some people, their understanding of the real world of international relations seems to have frozen in the cabbage patch at Ballingarry in 1848, the year of revolutions throughout Europe. For them, the nation state is, for all its faults, the best way we have to deliver democracy. Like the Bourbons, whom one presumes they would not pick as role models, these supernationalists have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
What all the mainland members of the EU and the applicants and aspirants all learnt during the 20th century from the most bitter and terrible experience was that the nation state on its own does not guarantee democracy, freedom or the rights of small nations.
On the contrary, it proved to be a mockery, a snare and a delusion. There is a school of thought that holds that Europe as a collection of self-styled, sovereign nation states actually ceased to exist in 1945 or even 1938.
What that great mentor of eurosceptics, Margaret Thatcher, never understood, any time that she had the impudence to lecture European mainlanders on sovereignty, was that the only way to preserve nations and sub-national entities was to share sovereignty at a level where it could be effective in the real world.When the American colonists went down the road which led to a Federal Constitution in 1787, they did so to the slogan : 'If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately'. There is, however, a price for entering a commitment. Sometimes in a democracy, we have to accept the right of others, the majority, to win the argument.
I do not necessarily agree, for example, that the conflict between transnational capital and the nation state is the fundamental problem of our time.
War, hunger, disease and the terminal degradation of the global environment would be some contenders for the title.
However, if there is a little problem with transnational capital being able to skate the global economy without let or hindrance, surely the answer is to create a democratically accountable, guaranteed constitutional political framework for the planet.
But when the governments of the six began with the coal and steel community, is that not precisely what they were setting out to begin? And is that not the ongoing process in which we must partake?
Maurice O'Connell,
19 Forge Park,
Tralee,
Co Kerry.
