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EU call to re-run treaty referendums
"The countries which have said No will have to ask themselves the question again. And if we don't manage to find the right answer, the treaty will not enter into force," he said in an interview with the Belgian Le Soir newspaper.
The EU Treaty is not going to pass the referenda in France on the 29th. (It will also probably fail in the Netherlands and later in the UK). There is a large amount of public apathy and disdain for the EU and the response is hardly enthusiastic in any country when it comes to the UN. Every poll has shown that the public doesn't feel any connection to the EU and that the EU is not concerned for them, so in France they are going to reject it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who wrote the EU Constitution has said there can be no renegotiation of this treaty.
In a democracy, usually the government molds to the will of the people. If the EU were democractic it would mold to the will of the people. Instead the current President says that the poll should be re-run until the people answer correctly. It isn't the EU that needs to change, it's the people that need to change. That is no democracy.
The European Union Constitution is over 300 pages long, as opposed to the US Constitution which can fit in your pocket. People have no idea and no desire to read this entire document, they'll reject it because it takes a lawyer to decipher. The EU could have drafted a small document and passed laws instead, which is what the people wanted, but instead the EU went their own way and blame the people for voting against it. The EU is dying and the project is on life-support. It may come back later, but that depends on whether the bureaucrats listen and recognize that they need to be the Union the people wants them to be, not that the citizens need to be the citizens the bureaucrats want them to be. Time will tell whether they embrace democracy, try to impose the EU despite the objections, or abandon it all together.
Article comments
1 - Dave Nalle
Not a surprising response to the pending failure of the EU Constitution. They already previously said that there shouldn't be referenda at all, but that the Constitution should be approved only by member state parliaments.
May 26, 2005 at 10:58 am
If I lived in Europe I'd want the EU Constitution to ONLY pass if every country had a real referendum on it. One of the most bogus aspects of it is that most of the member states approved it only in their parliaments with no popular vote at all.
For more comprehensive analysis of ths subject you might want to check out my previous posts here and
2 - John Bambenek
I agree. It always has been that the EU has been for the elites, by the elites, through the elites. The only reason they got concerned about the people is they had to pass a referenda, and instead of making it more appealing, they just said "well, if you vote no America wins". I'm not sure America has an official position on the success of the EU, though I'd imagine they'd be for it.
3 - RJ
So it goes in Europe. If the political elites want to stir up the masses, they throw the US into the mix, even if it's apropos of nothing...