Europe

That Irish referendum

by

It occurred to me that what with one thing and another the significance of today’s referendum in Ireland may be lost on many readers of Chicagoboyz. Somehow Ireland, both North and South, have become less important on the other side of the Pond, now that Sinn Fein has been safely installed in the Ulster Assembly. There are, however, other issues at stake.

Let me recap. The Lisbon Treaty is a regurgitated version of the Constitution for Europe, the previous treaty agreed on by the previous Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) of the European Union. The Constitution, a whacking document of several hundred pages that laid down rules for just about everything though, to be fair, many of them had already existed in other treaties, was rejected in two referendums in 2005. The two were in core members of the European Union: France and Netherlands.

There followed a period of flurried activity, led by the Commission, specifically by the ditzy Margot Wallstrom, who is in charge of communications, that is, propaganda. She even set up a blog, which was so dull that even the eurosceptics who kept posting responses to her fluffy pieces, gave up after a while.

The idea was that the EUrocracy would have a dialogue with the people of Europe and find out their opinion. The fact that the opinion had already been given in two countries seemed to be irrelevant. In the fullness of time there was another IGC and another treaty, the Lisbon one, which was, apart from a few unimportant details, exactly the same as the Constitution. Because it was laid out differently, all EU member states were told that this was different and, therefore, there will be no referendums, even though serious constitutional changes were being proposed.

The Irish Supreme Court decided that, according to the Irish constitution, there will have to be a referendum and one duly took place. Well, blow me down. The people voted the wrong way and were told to vote again. The second referendum is taking place today and, naturally, we are all hoping that the Irish will prove to be as recalcitrant as they have been throughout their history.

In the meantime, all but two other member states have ratified. In Germany the parliament had to pass a number of laws to bring the German Constitution in line with the Lisbon Treaty as instructed by the country’s Constitutional Court. In the Czech Republic the treaty has been returned to the Constitutional Court by a number of Senators and the President is waiting for the decision. He is reluctant to sign but will probably have to if the legal decision goes the wrong way. Following that Poland will sign. This, of course, depends on an yes vote today in Ireland. If, on the other hand, the Irish vote no again, we shall have an interesting situation. Will the EU demand a third referendum or will they, as is much more likely, take this treaty off the table, push through as much of it as possible on the quiet and call another IGC to produce another document in a couple of years’ time.

Either way, the whole process has been incredibly painful for the European Union, its bureaucracy and supporters. The gloss has gone completely, the process is no longer inevitable and the nasty bits – lies, bullying and cheating to get their way – are showing.

For any glutton for punishment, I have more on Your Freedom and Ours.

If the other children told you to jump out of the window …

by

All of us who can recall our childhood and have had to deal with children ourselves know the scenario. Child whines because everybody has something or other, does something or other, is going somewhere or other. Eventually, the parent, irritated beyond rationality says: “And if all those others told you to jump out of the window would you do it?”. Or words to that effect.

I thought of that again when I read Lex’s links to Megan McArdle and her extremely sensible comment about not wanting the state acquiring a bigger role in healthcare. “Nay, not even if all the other countries . . . well, all the cool countries, anyway . . . are doing it.” Clearly, I cannot intervene in the heated debate about American healthcare and the changes proposed by what seems to be known more and more widely as Obamacare. I do not live in the United States and, therefore, my knowledge is second hand, therefore, inadequate. (Though, I notice that a similar handicap with regards to Britain does not stop various people from commenting with … ahem … varying degrees of accuracy.)

However, I do know something about that argument of all the other countries … well, all the cool countries having something and, therefore, we must as well. In Britain we have had to put up with that inane argument over and over again as step by step we surrendered all that made the British legal, political and constitutional system not only different (not unique because other Anglospheric countries have developed along very similar lines) but much better.

Adversarial parliamentary democracy where debates are out in the open and subjects are, indeed, kicked about? No, no, no, must not turn health/education/name-your-subject into a political football. Look how they do it on the Continent. Well, how they do it is to make decisions behind closed doors and call it a consensus.

Adversarial legal system? Not what they have in other countries. Well, not in the cool other countries where we like going on holidays. We should have a procuratorial system, too. Don’t want to be left out of the game.

And so on, and so on. Yet the answer is so simple: our system is different from those other cool countries’ because it has grown differently over many centuries; it also happens to be considerably better. That’s it.

“…their total inability to admit the possibility of a social order which is not made by political design”

by

In Britain and among the English-speaking peoples … Locke’s ideas were simply combined with the old English tradition of limited government. Rather than a project for a new society and a new morality, the English revolution of 1688 and, to a lesser extent, the American revolution of 1776 were basically, though not only, a reassertion of the rights of free Englishman to live their lives as they used to live them before—under the common protection of the laws of the land. In other words, what we now call liberal democracy has emerged in the Anglosphere as a natural outgrowth of existing, law-abiding and moral-abiding ways of life. For this reason, liberal democracy among the English speaking peoples has been naturally associated with an ethos of duty—which, as Burke pointed out, is not and should not be deduced from will. For this reason, too, liberal democracy in the Anglosphere has been tremendously stable. And the English-speaking peoples have always been the first to rise in defence of their cherished liberties—their way of life.
 
In continental Europe, by contrast, the idea of liberty has tended to be understood as an adversarial project: adversarial to all existing ways of life simply because, in a sense, they were already there; because they had not been designed by ‘Reason’. This has generated a lasting instability in European politics. This adversarial attitude, combined with a widespread disregard for limited government, has led European politics to be recurrently dominated by two absolutist poles: revolutionary liberals and later revolutionary socialists, on the one hand, and counter-revolutionary conservatives, on the other. They both have aimed at using government without limits to push forward their particular, and usually sectarian, agendas. Their clash—the clash between the so-called liberal project and traditional ways of life—has been at the root of the historical weakness of European liberal democracy, when compared with liberal democracy among the English speaking peoples. This weakness also explains why, differently from the English-speaking peoples, continental Europeans are not usually the first to rise in defence of our liberties when our liberties become at risk.

João Carlos Espada, Edmund Burke and the Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty (2006)

An Island People in a Sea of Humanity

by

This Forbes article talks about China being an empire, i.e., a polity composed of many different ethnic groups but trying to behave as a nation, i.e., a polity based around a single ethnic group. [h/t Instapundit] This reminded me of a mock map at the very interesting blog Strange Maps.

The map below combines the distribution of China’s ethnic Han population (the people we think of as Chinese) with China’s geographic isolation to produce an image of the Han inhabiting an island surrounded by a sea of non-Han peoples.

china-island-400_2

This post accompanying the map makes several very good points:

Read more