Another `No' to Nice would be welcome

It could be regarded as a masterpiece of bad timing, to have been absent from these pages for the last three weeks because of having had a baby. As one of a large minority who are resigned to being on the losing side of referendums, imagine having to miss probably the only chance I will ever get to have been writing on the side of those who actually win.

Certainly, if our lords and masters have their way, I will not be on the winning side of the Nice Treaty twice. The outraged reaction of the establishment to the No vote would be funny if it were not so worrying. According to the Yes side, those of us who voted No could choose between being part of the looney left or the religious right, between being ignorant or easily confused by lying arguments. Not to mention between being greedy or anti-enlargement. Or perhaps being guilty of being all those things at once.

It would never do to admit publicly that voters might have known what they were doing. Or that, if given the opportunity, the electorates of most EU member--states would reject Nice with even greater vehemence. After all, France barely squeaked an acceptance of Maastricht, and the Danes rejected it. The solution appeared to be to deny ordinary people the opportunity to do anything so embarrassing in the future.

The Irish people could see that this might be one of the last opportunities they would get to register disquiet at any aspect of the European project. They seized it with both hands. The wisdom of voting No while we still have a chance to do so is underlined by the reaction of the political and media elites. The people may have spoken but it is the wrong answer. The referendum will have to be re-run after a suitable period of re-education of the deluded.

Such a reaction is very foolish, because voters do not like Henry Ford politics - you can vote any way you like so long as it is Yes. Voter apathy is on the increase almost everywhere in the Western world. That is as a direct consequence of feeling that your vote does not matter, that forces outside your control shape your destiny.

But a reaction other than apathy is possible and that is to mobilise. It may well be true that the lobby groups opposing Nice were a motley crew with very different motivations, but they all shared a distrust of massive and unaccountable institutions. That struck a chord with those who actually intended to vote. In an age of cynicism, lobby groups represent a spirit of idealism. It contrasts harshly with what people perceive as the craven acceptance of European diktats by politicians.

Also, Fianna Fail gambled on political memories being short. It reneged on a promised referendum on the PfP. It hoped the electorate would forget. It did not. Whenever people feel that their democratic right to dissent is being eroded, they react against it. The Government's denial of democracy was blatant in the case of PfP but something similar has been happening to that other model of the democratic process, the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. No matter how valuable an idea partnership is, it fails once people feel they are being coerced.

There is much that is valuable in the notion of greater European co-operation, but it too is doomed to failure if persuasion of its peoples is abandoned in favour of railroading them into acceptance. Such was the contempt shown for the ordinary voter in much of the commentary that the only surprising thing is that Nice was not rejected by a greater margin.

One of the claims made continually by the Yes side, in tones of injured innocence, was that there was nothing about militarisation or neutrality or any number of other issues in the Treaty of Nice itself. This was at best disingenuous, because it was an attempt to sell Nice as an entity in itself rather than an incremental step in a particular direction. The Treaty of Nice did not materialise out of the ether. It built on every earlier treaty and it was produced as a creaky compromise document by an EU elite which is showing worrying signs of wanting to be a world power without the consent of its peoples. The voters clearly saw Nice as a referendum on the direction of Europe and voted accordingly.

Privately, politicians were admitting that Nice was a badly drafted treaty hammered out after lots of skulduggery in which national interests were put first. Publicly, they were selling it as an act of altruism which would enable our brothers and sisters in eastern Europe finally to step forth from the dark shadows of communism. Meanwhile, the EU was proposing to limit the rights of those same brothers and sisters to work in the current countries of the EU for seven years.

Voters dislike spin. They particularly dislike the kind of spin epitomised by an article in this newspaper in which Prof Rory O'Donnell came out with gems like: "Many citizens feel they do not quite understand how the European Union works. This uncertainty has been skilfully exploited to suggest that the complexity of the EU is deliberately constructed to camouflage its hidden agenda. The reverse is the case. The complexity of the EU is reassuring."

Well, it may be reassuring for Prof O'Donnell, but anybody who has ever spent time in Brussels would say that its labyrinthine bureaucracy is closer to a vision of hell.

He went on to say that the EU is complex and obscure largely because it accords every member-state such painstaking participation in formulation of policy, decision-making and implementation. Policies emerge from a complex network of committees and working groups, in all of which the Government is represented.

He may well have put his finger on something here. Governments may be represented, but as the rejection of the Nice Treaty shows, governments are not to be equated with the peoples of their countries. As one friend of mine said, the best reason to vote against Nice is that no other electorate in Europe will be given the opportunity to do so. And it's not a bad reason to vote No again.

bobrien@irish-times.ie