Pity the Poor Eurocrats
Pretty much for as long as I’ve been paying attention to these things, Europe has been “in crisis” or “in chaos” or “in despair” because one or another European country failed to ratify yet another European treaty. Invariably, something cataclysmically important was at stake, such as the creation of a European currency. Often the difficult country was a small one — Denmark, say, whose voters rejected the treaty that helped create the European currency in 1992. At that time, France and Germany bemoaned the fact that some tiny number of Danes were “holding up Europe.” The Danes were duly sat upon, negotiated with and granted “opt-outs” until they voted the right way a year later. Order was restored — until the French themselves voted against the European constitution in a referendum in 2005. Whoops!
This week’s villain is Ireland, possibly the country that has benefited most from its membership in the European Union. During the first two decades of its membership, Ireland received some $50 billion from other European taxpayers, a sum that helped transform Ireland from an ancient basket case, famed for its tragic poets, into a 21st-century economic success, famed for its software companies. Dublin went from backwater to boomtown, the Irish began importing immigrants and, in one memorable moment, Irish per capita income surpassed that of Britain — and then kept going. It remains, remarkably, among the highest in the world. The decisive Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty last week thus has a certain poignancy: The country that owes more to “Europe” than any other has now blocked, possibly forever, a set of reforms that, in lieu of that rejected constitution, were meant to give “Europe” a real foreign policy face: a proper president, for example, and a minister of foreign affairs.
Why did the Irish say no? Part of the answer lies in the protest letter that one “no” voter in County Clare attached to his ballot paper. Given the opportunity to support or reject a unified European foreign policy, he chose instead to protest the fact that Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline, is no longer flying from Shannon Airport to Heathrow. “Pity the poor Eurocrats” who have to deal with that sort of sentiment, wrote Fintan O’Toole, an Irish Times editor, who also reported that a woman in Galway City declared that she wouldn’t vote for the treaty because she feared her sons would be drafted into the new European army — an army that, of course, the treaty would not create.