Mais artigos sobre o referendo irlandês (ver aqui e aqui). A maioria são do Guardian (Comment is free). A ordem temporal da publicação dos artigos não foi respeitada, e a sua escolha não implica que esteja de acordo com tudo aquilo que dizem. Vou continuar a apresentar mais artigos sobre o mesmo:
AC Grayling: Fear trumps hope Comment is free guardian.co.uk
A kind of inevitability attaches to the partially true things that have been and will be said about the meaning of the Irish rejection of the EU treaty.
A summary of one of them might go like this: the Irish referendum is a sparkling example of democracy in action, say some. Say others: 1% of the EU population screwing things up for the other 99%? Sparkling indeed, especially given that Ireland (along with Portugal) has been the greatest beneficiary of EU membership, as anyone who remembers Ireland just a couple of decades ago will testify, with still-continuing astonishment at the transformation into today's brilliant country. ...as they have with the likelihood that the rest of the EU will find a way round the problem somehow, although probably not with recourse (as the Irish no voters perfectly well knew) of saying, OK then, leave.
...The real lesson of the referendum is that fear is always a more saleable political commodity than hope. ... . An Irish businessman called Ganley can orchestrate a campaign on fears of loss of sovereignty and the "remoteness" of Brussels etc in the staring face of the EU's benefits to Ireland, knowing that the number of people among the 53% no voters (about 30% of the electorate?) who had actually read the treaty is probably way less than 10. Good work, Ganley. And your business will continue to prosper – because you're in the EU! Fear has its limits.
... Of course these are different kinds of fears: but the appeal to them is an appeal to the natural self-protective and preserve-the-status-quo instincts we all have. The problem is that the messages are always painfully simplistic: safety, security, "sovereignty", "remoteness of Brussels" - and whereas they all have varying degrees of point, the question is not that degree itself but its relation to the benefits and costs of acting one or another way in response. Mature societies accept certain risks for their freedoms; countries in relation to others in the EU accept the costs as offset by the benefits - which for some, not least for Ireland, are sometimes vast. It is a matter of choice, but not the kind that can be made on the basis of slogans.
...Reality has its own way of dealing with hopes and rhetoricians. But if you were to put money on which message is likely to be the more potent, the odds would be short indeed.Denis MacShane: The Irish vote has bust open some myths of Europe Comment is free guardian.co.uk
Hooray for the Irish! The victory by Gerry Adams, the Irish Socialist Workers' party and their millionaire friends has forced the debate about Europe into the open. Britain's moneyed elites who pay for Open Europe along with the media elites of London and the Conservative party are now poised to begin the building down of Europe.
Some myths need to be dispelled. ... President Sarkozy of France was handsomely elected on a platform of supporting the treaty and defying his opponents who made their call for a referendum a core part of the 2007 election campaign in France. ... Similarly, the new Polish government was elected on a strong pro-Lisbon platform in place of the Eurosceptic Kaczynski administration. ... . The Spanish have voted twice in favour of Europe – once in a 2005 referendum and again this March, when the pro-Treaty socialist government was re-elected.... Another myth is that this vote is some kind of a surprise. Every opinion poll in Britain for the last 30 years has shown a majority against the EU. Yet in elections, voters do not elect anti-European parties, as Labour discovered to its cost when it espoused anti-European lines in the 1980s. A third myth is that the Irish voted specifically on the Lisbon treaty. Yet issues like abortion, Irish neutrality, taxation and other concerns that have nothing to do with the treaty were at the forefront of the campaign
How then to reconcile these two competing visions of democracy? Which is more democratic – the Irish plebiscite in which almost all voters seen on television confessed they did not understand the treaty just as much of the legislation passed in the Commons is hard to fathom. A dreadful headache is guaranteed for anyone who tries to decipher the 500 pages of single-spaced typing in Britain's annual finance bill that translates the budget into law. If Britain had a referendum on the finance bill it would be child's play to get a no vote. Yet by any definition the 45% of national income taken from the people by the state is more important than the 1% of Europe's gross national income that flows to Brussels. So we elect parliaments to settle the finance bill and to agree the myriad of international treaties, under which Britain shares sovereignty with other countries.
... Finding a way forward will not be easy. Europe that cannot or does not want to defend and explain itself may soon start to move backwards, with the gradual loss of open frontiers, open trade and the only region in the world where social and environmental rights are advocated powerfully. ... .Is it what Britain needs? In that sense the Irish have done us a favour. If pro-Europeans roll over and Labour ministers fail to find any enthusiasm for Europe, then last Thursday's vote could be the first steps in the slow detachment of the British island nations from the EU.Hugo Brady: The era of the grand treaty is over Comment is free guardian.co.uk
Ireland has sent Europe into tumult by garrotting the Lisbon treaty at the ballot box. The possibility of resuscitating the treaty is slight. Given the large turnout, a second referendum on the text is likely to be ruled out by Irish politicians as unfeasible. Wholesale renegotiation is not on the agenda: the EU has had more than seven years of interminable talk about institutions and rules already.
... It is time for EU countries to think the unthinkable: integration by grand treaty is over. ... But the global issues that the Lisbon treaty was designed to help Europeans address will not go away. Immediate priorities like the global economic downturn, high unemployment, climate change, uncertainty over energy supplies, migration and cross-border crime need to be tackled collectively and soon.
... Institutions matter. Although they are not perfect, they are the way Europeans work together. From time to time they will always need tweaking. Hence for now governments will have to limit themselves to less ambitious ways of reforming the EU to make it work better.
The first is to make the best use of the Nice treaty, the EU's current rulebook. Article 42 of the Nice treaty also allows for the EU as a whole to take a much greater, and more accountable, role in dealing with cross-border crime and migration issues, if every member-state agrees. The treaty also allows for groups of countries (a minimum of eight) to press ahead without others in almost any policy area, provided the single market is unaffected. In practice this happens already with the EU passport-free travel area, the euro and defence policy. Successful initiatives among smaller groups will draw others in. The EU has major foreign policy challenges: a resurgent Russia, a rising China and the priority to present a united front to a newly elected US president in 2009. The Lisbon treaty would have created a quasi-diplomatic corps for the EU by merging various bits of the Brussels bureaucracy to improve the design and delivery of EU foreign policy at home and abroad. Arguably, this innovation can also go ahead without treaty change. Looked at closely, it is uncontroversial.
The second is to pursue future integration issue by issue, in terms people can better understand. National parliaments and the public are suspicious of grand treaties because they sniff a conspiracy to build a European super-state. But single-issue treaties – on democracy, energy, or climate change for example – would have clearer benefits. Such "salami-style" treaties would also improve the chances that national debates will stick to the text of the deal in question without introducing unrelated issues as a reason to say no.
Lastly, the EU will have to undertake some reform of its institutions if Croatia is to join sometime around 2010. Governments have to agree an accession treaty with Croatia to adjust the size of the European institutions for its entry. In the treaty, they should also introduce a fairer EU voting system and a number of extra measures to boost accountability. These include allowing national parliaments to block intrusive EU laws, an initiative to allow citizens to directly petition legislation and an expansion of the powers of the European parliament to hold the governments and commission to account.
As in Ireland's referendum, the people can give up on politicians. But politicans cannot give up serving the interests of the people. Europeans are a declining political and economic force in the world today. Across a range of global challenges, we simply do not have the luxury of going it alone. ...Editorial: EU reform - unloved, thrice rejected Comment is free The Guardian
... It [o governo irlandês] let the referendum on the Lisbon treaty become the hostage of general public discontent. ... . It was an odd time to be asking Irish voters to trust their leaders. But yesterday's referendum was all about trust - and the Irish political elite, the French and the Dutch elites before them (and, one would suspect, the British) notably failed the test.
It mattered not that the Lisbon treaty leaves the position on tax harmonisation, neutrality or abortion unchanged. All that mattered was those businessmen wary of losing their low corporation tax, or those worried that Ireland was sleepwalking into a superstate with its own army, had a platform wide enough to accommodate ultra-rightwing Catholics, neoliberals, pragmatic Eurosceptics, traditional nationalists, and Trotskyists. ...
... The Irish rejection was so emphatic yesterday, with 53.4% against 46.6% in favour, that Mr Cowen can hardly go back to the people and ask them to think again, as happened over the Nice treaty in 2002. Then the excuse for the wrong answer the first time round was low turnout. That trick will not work again. The alternative, as Mr Barroso suggested, is for the remaining states to forge ahead and leave Ireland to work out its own relationship with the Lisbon arrangements.
This, too, is fraught with problems, as Ireland has already opted out of large chunks of the treaty, such as defence, justice and home affairs. It is not clear what more it could derogate from. ...
In the longer term, however, the prospects of creating a Europe with a strong voice and distinct leadership are darker this morning than they were yesterday. .... If integration by grand constitution is dead, and integration by small treaty in a rut, business will be conducted by smaller groups of countries. This is not a union that will find it easy to accept Turkey as a member, defend its common interests against Russia, or speak with one voice about the Middle East, global warming or trade. But it is the union we have now got.
(continua)
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