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Good on the Dutch.
Dutch voters overwhelmingly rejected the European constitution in a referendum Wednesday, exit polls projected, in what could be a knockout blow for the charter roundly defeated just days ago by France.
An exit poll projection broadcast by state-financed NOS television said the referendum failed by a vote of 63 percent to 37 percent. The turnout was 62 percent, exceeding all expectations, the broadcaster said.
Although the referendum was consultative, the high turnout and the decisive margin left no room for the Dutch parliament to turn its back on the people’s verdict. The parliament meets Thursday to discuss the results.
Dennis McShane, former Minister of Europe, does not appear to have fallen away from the limelight completely, given his recent appearance on Question Time and his subsequent interview for UPI. Cheerleading for Europe with Dimbleby will not tax anyone, but McShane provided some more interesting comments that may cast some light on the current thinking about Europe within the Blair administration, or what backbenchers have to say if they wish to be considered for the next reshuffle.
From the first, McShane makes a point of viewing the French referendum in the faint tones of a realist who accepts a verdict of imprisonment. It is a counsel of acceptance and stoicism, of truth-telling and endeavour; that infamous stranger to the truth, Blairite candour:
“Britain will hold a referendum if there is a treaty to hold a referendum on,” MacShane said. “But a French Non means the new Treaty of Rome cannot be ratified. It was always a mistake to call a Treaty a constitution. But a constitution needs the confidence of the people and powerful, united leadership. Europe lacks confidence and effective leadership today so it was not a propitious time to hold plebiscites on the new Treaty. There may be some who hope this Treaty can be made to fly but it would be an insult to France and her citizens to say the Treaty they reject will continue on as a dead man walking. We will have to begin again.”
The critique proffered is interesting, since it borrows and begs arguments from the Eurosceptics, in order to incorporate them into pro-EU swaddling. McShane recognises the hostility with which the smaller countries attacked the removal of their representation on the Commission and yet, defends the existing Constitution as a “coherent response” to the problems of the European Union. However, the Constitutional answer (to a question that none of Europe’s electorates ever asked) was found wanting. The leaders of Europe could not inspire their voters and the European economy was ruined by:
“… wrong decisions by the European Commission with its obsession on over-regulation and by the failure of the European Central Bank to respond to the economic standstill,” MacShane said. “Political-constitutional advances have to be based on economic and social confidence. ”
The Eurosceptic critique of the project needs to respond to the flanking movement of pro-Europeans like McShane, who borrow their ideas in order to promote different conclusions. Like some grinning, drooling revenant, that refuses to die, unlike the rest of the reactionaries that pass for social democrats these days, the Third Way has been resurrected as an unlikely combination of welfarism, market economics and environmentalism to provide a new moral backbone for coercion in the name of the public good that is Europe.
“The answer will not be found by the gentlemen of Brussels but by the willingness of political actors in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Britain and the rest of Europe to rethink out-of-date 20th century economic and social ideology. We need a new 3-way historic compromise between economy, society and environment. Unfortunately we only hear the shrill protectionism and rejectionism of those who know how to say No to the future rather than work collaboratively to build a new Europe.”
“I hope this shock will force pro-Europeans to unite and defeat the reactionary forces of the left and right who have unleashed a politics of fear in place of the hope all Europeans need,” McShane added.
It is too early to tell if this forms an altered vision of Europe, one that may appeal to moderates and one nation Tories. By acknowledging its current failures, McShane’s arguments may provide a pleasing lure for those who argue that the European Union can be reformed. It also gives pointers to Blair’s approach in the forthcoming British Presidency of the European Union. As such, the Eurosceptic movement needs to counter conservatives and reformers within the EU, forcefully argueing that such approaches will prove inferior to the development of a free-trading area.
We have already had people from the commission this morning talking about how they ‘interpret’ the French vote. What don’t they understand? No is no.
If the government in this country or the commission try to breathe life into this corpse, then we in Britain we must have a say to deliver the final blow.
– Liam Fox, Tory Shadow Foreign Secretary
With the decisive French ‘Non’ to the EU Constitution, clearly the whole project for European super-statist integration has taken a hit unlike any in its history thus far. In many ways the most significant feature of this is that it has made the intellectual and social disconnect between whole peoples in the EU’s constituent nations impossible to paper over. In short, the nation called ‘Europe’ is seen to be a fiction and the ‘inevitable march of progress’ has been shown to be an illusion.
So what happens next? The obvious move by Tony Blair is to cancel the UK’s promised referendum as being moot now that the process has been derailed. Yet there are already frantic attempts going on by the integrationists to prevent that from happening, on the basis that it would be an admission that the process really is over.
Now this attempt to get the UK to vote anyway is really splendid news and I hope that other people who share my views that the EU is an abomination will remember Napoleon’s dictum “never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake” as any UK vote will almost certainly be a vote against the EU which will just widen the rift in political cultures between France and the UK.
As I have stated before, unlike David, I wish that France had voted ‘Oui’ so that Blair could not possibly wriggle out of his commitment to hold a referendum and thus allow Britain to vote ‘No’, thereby making the UK a virtual ‘pariah state’ to the French, Spanish and German political elites and as a result making them perverse allies in the effort to disengage the UK from the EU. Oh well, scratch one possible optimistic scenario but the situation is now alive with all sorts of other interesting possibilities.
But it is still hard to see the rejection of the EU Constitution by anyone as bad news. How it will play out remains to be seen but the attempt to sleepwalk Europe into an ever more dystopian regulatory super-state just got a bucket of cold water poured over it. The game is afoot and provided the Tory Party do not go and live up to their nickname name by choosing some member of the Quisling right to lead them, maybe even that collection of risk averse Grandees will realise that taking on the EU is something that can reap huge political benefits. Labour too must be looking at the spectacle of the French power elite being bitten in the arse by millions of common people who want the political system to impose economic and social stasis to a background rap of splendidly unintelligible gibberish from sundry French intellectuals and thinking “there but for the grace of God…”. At least some of them must be wondering if the downside of Euro-integration is worth the political risks.
The dismay is palpable. It is hard not to laugh. 
To all French crypto-communists, syndicalists, marxists, trotskyites, leninists, stalinists, national socialists, socialist nationalists, primitivists, Trade Union dinosaurs, student activists, greenie nutters, neo-fascists, old fashioned fascists, quasi-crypto-troglodyte-Pol-Pottist-year zero-flat-earthers, looney tunes and enviro-goons… Merci Beaucoup!!!!
I could kiss every single one of you (but I don’t know how to say that in French).
For what it may or may not be worth, Channel 4 News has just said that a leaked exit poll gives the Non side victory with between 53 and 55 per cent of the vote.
Meanwhile, the EU Referendum blog reports that it has read a document which explains that Non will not actually mean No:
In short, the authors conclude that, in the event of one or both countries voting “no”, the ratification process should be neither suspended nor abandoned. They assert that all member states have expressed a commitment to proceed with ratification by virtue of Declaration 30, appended to the Constitutional Treaty. Member states cannot unilaterally or collectively decide to change the ratification process.
Thus, member states which have not already ratified should continue with the process whence, once 20 members have done so, the matter should be referred to the European Council.
In the meantime, the authors caution that “the European Union must not remain paralysed”. Rather, they say, “it must continue and intensify its efforts to relaunch its policies, even by implementing in advance, where possible, the provisions of the Treaty that do not meet with open opposition”.
Thus, the considered response in the event of a rejection of the constitution should be “full steam ahead”. Member states should implement it even faster than they are doing already.
Very helpful. I wish I could be equally helpful in return on this question:
So what, precisely, do we have to do to stop this thing?
I read the EU Referendum blog in the hope of getting answers to questions like that. If they have to ask that, what is the chance that anyone else will have an answer?
Having been subjected to some robust criticism for my occasional cyncism about the whole modern democratic process, I am actually a little peeved to discover that I am but a mere dilettante:
If the French and the Dutch reject the EU Constitution on Sunday and Wednesday, they should re-run the referendums, the current president of the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker, has said.
“If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No, would have to ask themselves the question again”, Mr Juncker said in an interview with Belgian daily Le Soir.
‘No’ is not the right answer, you see.
The whole bloody continent is heading for another war. Britain out now.
Sidenote: This Mr. Juncker chappie is the president of the EU? Hands up anyone, anywhere who has ever heard of him!
French voters go to the polls this weekend to vote on the European Union constitution, with polls so far suggesting that the “no’s” will narrowly win and shaft the wretched project, although one should never, ever under-estimate the ability of the political establishment to scare voters into saying “oui”. My hope, needless to say, is that the French vote against the constitution and throw a great big spanner in the works and prevent the creation of what will be, explicitly, a European superstate.
It is pointless at this vantage point to guess exactly what will be the impact on British political life if the French do nix the constitution. My rough guess is that Blair will secretly breath a deep sigh of relief, as will the Tories. I also think that the United States will also be glad about a no vote, although I am just guessing.
As Anatole Kaletsky writes in the Times today, the chronic underperformance of the euro zone economy is at the heart of much of that disenchantment (although other issues are important too).
Here’s a key graf:
The relative economic decline of “old” Europe since the early 1990s – especially of Germany and Italy, but also of the Netherlands and France – has been a disaster almost unparalleled in modern history. While Britain and Japan certainly suffered some massive economic dislocations, in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s respectively, they never experienced the same sort of permanent transformation from thriving full-employment economies to stagnant societies where mass unemployment and falling living standards are accepted as permanent facts of life. In Britain, unemployment more than doubled from 1980 to 1984, but conditions then quickly improved. By the late 1980s it was enjoying a boom, the economy was growing by 4 per cent and unemployment had halved. In continental Europe, by contrast, unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 per cent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 per cent only once in those 14 years.
He has a point, although I am struck by the fact that in France, much of the hostility to the constitution is coming not from pro-free marketeers, as is the case in many respects in Britain, but from those who fear that the process will open up France’s high regulated, high-tax economy to the icy winds of laissez faire. The ironies abound.
Of course, the fact of mere voters saying no to the EU juggernaut is unlikely to deflect the mixed assortment of deluded idealists, crooks, place-seekers and sundry camp-followers from trying to advance their aims. But a delicious irony would it be if the land of Bonaparte, de Gaulle and Asterix puts a major block in their path.
Xavier Méra has a piece up at Institut économique Molinari about the continuing and seemingly never-ending EU vendetta against Microsoft.
Concluding paragraphs:
That is not all. EU spokesman Antonia Mochan observed that the Media Player affair went “beyond the question of its name,” which has now been settled. Indeed, Microsoft’s rivals complain that the reduced version of Windows is not totally compatible with their programs. The EU’s competition department has stated that tests are under way, and an EU source wishing to remain anonymous confirmed the plaintiffs’ complaints about compatibility. It is perhaps this aspect, the least widely reported in the Media Player affair, which reveals the most about the validity of the charges made against the IT giant. In fact, if the commission ends up denouncing this state of affairs, it will once again be contradicting grievances it has put forward about Microsoft.
The point of the penalty is that the integrated version of Media Player allegedly damages competitors. Withdrawing it should therefore benefit them. If this is not the case, as they say and as the commission spokesperson suggests, that means these rival software writers are in reality third-party beneficiaries of the Windows Media Player system. It cannot be argued in the same breath that Microsoft both hurts and helps its competitors with the same product. It follows then that we cannot criticize Microsoft both for putting forward a Windows “N” that is “flawed” because it doesn’t contain specific Media Player files, and for being an “unfair” competitor with its complete version.
In a trial where logic has not been taken seriously, arbitrary judgement has played a more significant role than reason and experience. As the accusation continues down the same path, the Microsoft case is coming to look more and more like a witch-hunt.
Well, it sounds to me more like that Microsoft, having been ordered to do business differently from the utterly reasonable and beneficial-to-all-except-rivals way that it wants to, may have introduced a little minor self-inflicted sabotage, Atlas Shrugged style, in order to make the EU regulators feel like the prats that they are.
Either that, or they are maybe indulging in that alternative version of sabotage that consists of doing everything you are told and nothing else, which always causes havoc. Few things ruin complicated technological systems more quickly and more completely than pure obedience. Okay, if that is what you bastards say you want, that is what you will get . . .
And I say that they have a perfect right to do all of that. I have always thought that bitching about Microsoft including Media Player in Windows is about as sane as complaining about a car company including hub caps on its cars, on the grounds that this discriminates against disappointed hub cap suppliers. Which it sort of does, but so bloody what?
By the way, the first version of this posting that I stuck up was entitled, in error: “The EU versus the EU (again)”. (I decided to change it from “Microsoft versus the EU” to “The EU versus Microsoft”, but only got half way.) But maybe this was not such an error. Self destruction is what the EU often seems to be all about.
For those of you not able to drag your attention from our fascinating British national poll (okay, I’ll turn the snark button off now) there is always the European Union to keep us all amused. It emerges that the EU Commission has gotten a bit red-faced after it emerged that two saunas were installed in the new Brussels HQ out of consideration for its Scandanavian staff.
This seems a bit mean. It must be nice to unwind and loosen those muscle pains after a hard day churning out interminable directives and figuring out new ways to shaft Chinese textile exporters. In fact, I would like to make a modest proposal: perhaps all such officials could spend a lot more time in saunas, not to mention theatres, cinemas, restaurants, nightclubs, race courses and football grounds. In fact, anywhere but their own offices.
This Friday, Michael Jennings will be doing my last-Friday-of-the-month talk, about China. Emergence of, economic miracle, impact on rest of world, and so on.
And, as if determined to assist me in my efforts to publicise this event, the European Union, in the person of Euro-Panjandrum Peter Mandelson, has been uttering anti-Chinese fatuities:
The European Union has called on China to reduce its clothing exports to Europe or else face enforced limits.
That was the warning given by EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, as he launched an EU probe into nine categories of Chinese textile exports.
Exports of certain Chinese clothing items to Europe have surged by more than 500% since an international quota system came to an end on 1 January.
Heaven forbid that the people of Europe should be allowed to buy really cheap clothes, as much as they want. Clearly this is a retrograde step, and must be resisted.
“Europe” still lectures places like China as if places like China are the Third World, and Europe, obviously, is the first. But this has a very eighteenth century Asia feel to it, to me. Europe can no more prevent itself being swamped by, flooded with, etc. (although “sold” would be a better word) cheap clothes now than Asia could then prevent the incoming tide of pots and pans, cups and plates, and shirts, made in what was then the English workshop of the world.
This nonsense seems all to be based on some Agreement that was signed a few years ago. And it perfectly illustrates the folly of such agreements, which serve only to allow the supposedly protected industries to remain somnolent for a few more precious years, thereby to lose all touch with economic reality beyond the protections behind which they briefly shelter, to the point where the pressure of economic reality becomes so immense that it is impossible to resist, at which point the protection collapses and economic melt-down duly happens.
It also illustrates Public Choice Theory rather nicely. You can be sure that hundreds of desperate European shirt and trouser makers are even now busily conspiring to explain that Mandelson is talking sense rather than nonsense. Meanwhile the people whom Mandelson is trying to harm (everyone else in Europe plus many thousands of poor workers in China) will be too busy with other things to object very loudly. After all, each of us will only suffer a bit, and anyway, what can any of us do if the EU/Peter Mandelson has decided to harm us all, a bit. That is not news. That is Euro-business as usual.
In due course, the benefits to all of us of free trade with China will be concentrated into the hands of a few illegal clothes importers. But the clothes will not be quite so good or quite so cheap.
Reuters reports on the Chinese response here. My thanks to Alex Singleton of the Globalization Institute for the links, via this, which continues to happen at the ungodly hour that was originally promised. Tim Worstall comments on the same story at the Globalization Institute blog, making similar points to mine about the concentration of the (temporary) benefits associated with protection, but the dispersed nature of the costs, and about how previous restrictions have only stored up trouble.
Meanwhile, how else is “Europe” responding to the menace of people working too hard? By having a law against it.
It is a distinct possibility that the French Left will mobilize enough folks to vote down the EU constitution because, get this, it favours the free market too much. Well whatever, just so long as they vote Non, does it really matter that their reasons are completely antithetical to the reasons most Brits oppose the EU Constitution?
Or does it?
For people such as myself who do not believe that the EU can be reformed, it seems to me that far more damage will result to the EU by a British ‘no’ than from a French ‘non’. Why? Because France is inseparable from the whole neo-Carolingian Franco-German ‘Greater Europe’ project and thus accommodating French political realities are inevitably what will happen in the aftermath of French rejection of the Constitution. Britain on the other hand is seen rightly or wrongly as peripheral in the long run and thus a British rejection could well lead to the increasingly held view amongst the Europhiles that only with the UK out of the EU, either completely or in effect, can their grand aspirations be achieved… and that sounds pretty damn sweet to me as I want the UK out of the EU altogether.
That said, a French rejection which leads to so extreme a second attempt to draught a Euro-constitution that even the Europhiles in Britain blanche from trying to sell it to the Eurosceptic Brits works for me as well. Only time will tell.
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