The Cedar Lounge Revolution

One can’t help but think that Sarkozy had something when he noted that, as Cian on IrishElection put it:

‘if I come it is meddling, if I do not it is indifference’ (my own rough paraphrasing – Cian). .”

I saw the protests around Government Buildings on Monday and the thought crossed my mind that the EU certainly came to visit in person. But that said,had he arrived with the secession papers for Ireland from the EU signed and ready to roll at least one of the eggs thrown at him (by – irony of ironies – a French waiter) would still have gone his way. The home crowd contingent were a bit more restrained than that, but some sections were seething.

Or as Bredan Ogle of the Unite trade union put it in the Irish Times:

…he would have “loved” an invitation to the embassy [as did other No campaigners] to tell Mr Sarkozy why the Irish people voted no, but he said there was no need for Mr Sarkozy to come to Ireland.

“He should reflect upon the history of his own county, reflect on what happened when the French elites became divorced from their own people . . . We don’t need a modern-day Marie Antoinette coming here to lecture us.”

Well, as Marie Antoinette might have said, there’s having your cake and eating it. No point in criticising a faceless monolithic Europe that is indifferent to your concerns and then demurring when a face suddenly appears at the front door. In any case, I take a different view, in that I believe Sarkozy had a duty to explain fully what he meant last week, assuming he said it and what in his role was his thoughts on the future.

Patricia McKenna was slightly more nuanced, perhaps because she got the nod to visit the Embassy. She said that…

…she had been in two minds whether to attend. “It’s a poisoned chalice because in going there you’re giving it the credibility it doesn’t deserve.”

However, she said she decided to go as a mark of respect to the French people who voted no to the EU constitution.

“The second reason is because people like myself have to go there and do the job of Brian Cowen, which he should have done in the beginning.”

A grateful French people, or at least one section of same, will no doubt send a note of thanks some time very soon for her remarkable capacity to divine their intentions.

I can’t help but wonder at the massive coverage we saw. Whatever else the EU is suddenly a live, if impenetrable issue…

Still, a strange sort of a day with the IFA and farmers arguing that Sarkozy must help them quash Mandelson’s proposals about the WTO (and apparently Sarkozy applauded the IFA President who made precisely that point to him – CAP has certainly been to, and for, the benefit of the French). Indeed the IFA ‘welcomed’ Sarkozy with tractors painted in the colours of the French tricolour.

Sean Whelan on RTÉ news put it well when noted that: ‘this was about mending bridges… he knew he was walking on eggshells and was rather dainty in his approach’.

Dainty… eh?

And also on RTÉ it was noted by Whelan that: ‘he didn’t issue orders, didn’t dictate… he seems to have accepted 18 months to 2 years before any Referendum but he did point out that there are very real issues as regards which legal basis is used for the Parliament and for the Commission’.

As regards the opposition… Entertaining to see Lucinda Creighton glowering over Enda Kenny’s shoulder but I can’t help but wonder about Eamon Gilmore’s words. “I told him bluntly i didn’t see how it could be done [before 2009] that this would take some time’. Eamon is beginning to duck and dive… for he also said in the Irish Times that:

“I put it bluntly that a second referendum is being floated. A second referendum, if it were put this minute, I know it would be defeated again. There is not a great deal of point in that,” said Mr Gilmore.

Which is a bit different from his Non, never rhetoric of the weekend, and near inexplicable other than as a bid to solidify his slightly euro-sceptic credentials. Credentials that two months ago he didn’t have.

As for Sarkozy himself? Well unlike Brendan Ogle’s assertion that we’d be treated to a lecture, it was a quite different, ebullient but chastened display we saw. Listening, not hectoring, mode.

I never said that Ireland had to organise a new referendum, I said that at some time or another the Irish had to be given the opportunity to give their opinion.

It’s a tricky one, and comes back to his statement at the top. To talk about us is to meddle, to say nothing is to be indifferent.

Now much as I’m fond of him I was also a bit amused by Joe Higgins statements down at the Campaign Against the EU Constitution…

Unite and other high-profile No campaigners such as the Socialist Party had been excluded from the meeting because the Government did not want to reveal that workers had been against the treaty, Mr Higgins said.

“It is quite clear that the Office of the Taoiseach is dictating what happens this afternoon. The fact that trade unions who opposed the treaty, the Socialist Party and myself have been deliberately excluded doesn’t give me any cause for confidence in the meaningfulness of this meeting.”

Yes. I’m sure that’s it. I can only imagine the fear Sarkozy has of the Campaign and the forceful strength of its rhetoric. Which isn’t to say they are wrong on everything, but let’s not run away with ourselves about the efficacy or inevitability of that political position.

So overall? I can’t help but feel that the co-option of various elements of the NO vote can’t help their cause in the short term. Meeting elements of them was politically astute, not least because (and here I wonder if Joe had a point) it sliced them up into different camps. Incidentally, once more SF have come out with less publicity than might have been expected – very notably it was McKenna and Ganley (the latter in strongly complaining mode – not so much fun I suspect to be given the same 3 minutes at the Embassy as everyone else for the self-appointed arbiter of NO-ness) who got the airtime. Nor do the amazingly mixed messages on display clarify things (once more one thinks of the IFA). What they do indicate is near-chaos in terms of opinions. None of this helps resolve the specific central issue, that somehow the Irish peoples second date with destiny is getting closer. And that said while Sarkozy managed to pull something of a rabbit out of the hat in terms of refashioning his image after the coverage the previous week (not least in his emphatic embrace and kiss of a nonplussed Brian Cowen) – the fundamentals remain very much in place.

On a side issue, it’s with sinking heart that I read the analysis of the No vote in Prospect magazine by Andrew Moravcsik of the European Union programme at Princeton.

It’s not that it is a bad analysis, just that half way through is a glaring error.

The Irish referendum result—like the French and Dutch results in 2005—was not a rejection of the treaty of Lisbon. The outcome tells us almost nothing about views of Europe. Instead, it tells us a lot about referendums.

Polling evidence suggests that the Irish public, as in France and the Netherlands, overwhelmingly support the substantive content of the Lisbon treaty. (The only real controversy in Ireland was over small-country “voice” in voting weights and the number of commissioners.) This is why every political party in Ireland, except for one wing of Sinn Féin, supported it.

One wing of Sinn Féin? Really? Pray tell which is the other wing? And every political party? That would come as news to the Socialist Party for one. It’s a small thing, but the sort of oddity (and lack of fact-checking) which tends to undermine confidence in the rest of the analysis.

Moravscik argues that:

The treaty essentially ratified the status quo. It contained no grand ideas—nothing like the single currency underlying Maastricht in 1991 or the single market that preceded it in 1986. The major elements were a slightly strengthened co-ordinating apparatus for foreign policy, a rebalancing of voting weights, an elected president to replace the revolving one and carefully circumscribed majority voting in a few areas like sport and energy.

Nothing there I’d tend to disagree with.

He then enquires:

So why did the Irish reject the treaty? Referendums are poor indicators of public sentiment—particularly on issues of secondary concern to voters. They are easily captured by small groups armed with cash, a website and intensely committed supporters. In every European country, this core of Eurosceptic opposition to the treaty is found on the extremist fringes of the right and the left. To win referendums, however, such extremists must capture centrist voters. To do that, they have to direct debate away from, in this case, the treaty of Lisbon’s banal content. Three tactics assure their success.

These three are “exploit voter ignorance”, “spread misinformation” and finally “make the most of political discontent”. One could, I think, legitimately argue that few campaigns in whatever area and on whatever side have been free of such tactics, and to single out this one seems a little unfair. I’d still point the finger firmly back at a YES campaign of unparalleled awfulness and lack of energy and the appearance of a seemingly ‘reasonable’ right of centre political vehicle that could sweep up undecideds who might otherwise have broken in a traditional way probably to Fine Gael.

But in truth his view, say of foreign and defence policy is hard to argue with:

Opponents of Lisbon skilfully made it seem as if nearly a century of Dublin’s neutrality was threatened. In fact, the treaty simply seconded a small subset of national diplomats into a modest European diplomatic corps, permitted some very circumscribed voting and consolidated the existing EU bureaucracy under a single co-ordinating position worthy of Tony Blair rather than Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief. Any EU defence decision would remain unanimous, and would have to be pursued using coalitions of willing national forces rather than any “EU army.” (Were that not enough, Ireland received an additional legal opt-out, explicitly recognising its constitutional provision on neutrality.) And since neither defence nor foreign policy is an “exclusive” EU matter, member states remain free to pursue unilateral policies, even contrary to EU goals.

On the broader issues I think that last point is crucial. There are no political entities that I can think of that have permitted this sort of movement by component parts. Indeed one might wonder how the EU has managed to remain as coherent as it has in recent times despite this clear centrifugal force operating upon it. Once again the term sui generis comes to mind.

That said I think he makes some fair points in his conclusion about the central problem and how it came about:

The current impasse is the result of a decision taken in 2001 to cast minor institutional reforms as a grand constitutional document. The invocation of idealistic Euro-constitutionalist rhetoric straight out of the 1950s federalist movement led only to disinterest, disbelief and eventually distrust among voters—who couldn’t understand why such a fuss was being made about modest proposals. The resulting PR disaster was a self-inflicted wound by European politicians.

I think he’s right. Nothing could be more calculated to inspire suspicion than the sort of poorly thought out rhetoric that arrived in 2001. Prior to that there had been, in Ireland at least, a reasonably coherent pro-EU sentiment that found expression time and again at referendums. After that the rhetoric itself gave weight, however much I think it was over-exaggerated by those against the EU project as presently constituted, to claims of federalism and so forth, and crucially gave an opening to not merely the traditional opponents from further left and the extreme nationalist right, but also a soggier cohort who Libertas have courted. And ever after the fact that flag and anthem and other minimal but symbolically important trappings were in the Constitution has allowed those against to argue that this is the ‘inevitable’ destination of the project.

Of course away from starry eyed federalism and gloomy euro scepticism there is a third way, as Moravscik recognises:

But sooner or later the modest content of the treaty will be enacted, one way or another. Euro-pragmatists have the upper hand in every capital. They are already speaking of various complex legal expedients. Eighteen members have already ratified the document and the other eight, even Britain, are likely to do so. They will then move ahead on foreign policy co-operation and institutional reform, with or without the Irish. It will not be as clean as it might have been with Dublin’s support, but as the process of enlargement demonstrates, the EU succeeds by muddling through.

This smorgasbord approach as a solution strikes me as probably the best possible way forward. No more ringing declarations, no more wails of discontent but simply national states working together as best they can to chart a future for the EU. I genuinely see this – despite coming from a YES position – as an opportunity, most specifically for Ireland.

Another column in Prospect argues much the same. Their Brussels Diary suggests that Lisbon was the “Plan B” following the demise of the Constitution. The implications being that (and somewhat at odds with what Vincent Browne has being arguing over in the Village):

Eurosceptics claim that some of the Lisbon treaty can be implemented under existing powers. But this applies only to low-key initiatives. The important innovations require a new treaty because they change the legal basis on which the EU operates. For example, the creation of a new, more powerful foreign policy chief combines the current post held by Javier Solana with that of a European commission vice-president—a fundamental change in EU architecture. Similarly, changes to the voting system and a decision to endow the EU with “legal personality”—the right to sign international agreements—require treaty change. And, as we now all know, to get a treaty change all 27 member states have to agree.

And it recognises the basic problem… that:

The very minimum solution—”explanatory declarations” spelling out that Ireland would retain the right to neutrality, to set its tax rates and control abortion policy—is unlikely to be enough because these in fact offer nothing new.

Or:

Another possibility is to revoke plans to slim the size of the European commission, so that Ireland would retain the right to send a commissioner to Brussels. Significantly, this could be done without changing the treaty, providing the European council decides to do so unanimously. Later this year a division may emerge, with some, in Germany and the Benelux countries for example, wanting to offer Ireland the minimum necessary while making it clear that a second referendum “no” would mean some form of isolation.

Interestingly the British are having to play a complicated game in all this:

It [UK govt] is more alarmed about the prospect of a second Irish “no” and the threat of consigning Ireland to an outer tier of the EU. That is because, once deployed, the threat of exclusion could be used again in the future—maybe against London.

And here’s a fascinating snippet from the front, so to speak:

In May, a deal was struck on an EU directive guaranteeing rights to temporary workers. Under the law, countries can avoid giving temporary workers the same rights as their permanent colleagues from day one only if there is a deal among “social partners”—the unions and employers’ representatives much beloved of former commission president, Jacques Delors.

Intriguingly:

While in public the British government protested strongly about the planned legislation, in private it drew up the first agreement between the TUC and the CBI in decades. This gives British firms 12 weeks’ grace before implementing equal treatment.

Which is actually good news as regards workers rights. But curiously .. well, read on…

The main casualty was the luckless Irish government, which counted on Britain helping to block the legislation but, like everyone else, forgot that social partners exist in Britain. With no agreement of their own, the Irish will now have to give their temps full rights from day one.

Could that be true? Could our famously caring ’social-democrat’, or is it ’socialist government’, be so dependent upon the old enemy to block this reform? ‘Tis a mighty and complicated and hugely paradoxical beast this EU…