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What will happen to EU?
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| starsearcher |
Voters in Holland followed France and overwhelmingly rejected the European Consitution...
| quote: | Dutch Voters Reject EU Constitution
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer 26 minutes ago
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - 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.
The constitution was designed to further unify the 25-nation bloc and give it more clout on the world stage. But the draft document needs approval from all the nations to take effect in late 2006, and the "no" vote in both France and the Netherlands — founding members of the bloc — was a clear message European integration has gone awry.
When voting began, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said he was optimistic the electorate would defy the pollsters and vote on the merits of the constitution rather than their general feeling of malaise.
"The question is: Do we want to have progress today or do we choose a standstill, and for me the choice is obvious," he said.
But voters marking paper ballots with red pencils or pushing electronic buttons appeared to have a different view.
At an Amsterdam school, where about a dozen people waited to vote, a reporter had difficulty finding anyone in favor of the constitution. One said the charter would bolster Europe: "I think it's a good thing if there's a strong Europe," said Jaena Padberg. "It's good that our rights will be secured."
Some voters said that they were undecided up to the last moment and that it was one of the toughest choices they had faced in a polling booth.
"I can't decide because I don't feel I have enough information," said waitress Flora de Groot, who was determined to vote anyway. "At first I thought, yes, definitely. But now, because what I've heard from other people, I'm leaning toward no."
Opponents said they feared the Netherlands, a nation of 16 million people, would be overwhelmed by a European superstate even though the Dutch pay more per capita than any other country into the collective EU kitty.
Nicolas Ilaria, an immigrant from Suriname, said he was voting no. "In principle, I'm against bureaucracy and I don't believe everything is working well now," he said as he read a newspaper at an Amsterdam cafe.
Like many others, Ilaria voiced an underlying mistrust of Dutch politicians. "The government is not telling the truth about what is in the treaty," he said.
Others were concerned a strengthened Europe could force the liberal Dutch to scrap policies such as tolerating marijuana use, prostitution and euthanasia. Still others said they felt cheated by price increases after they traded in their guilders for the EU's common currency, the euro, in 2002.
"Things are going too fast," said Maarten Pijnenburg, in the "no" camp. "There's not enough control over the power of European politicians" under the new constitution.
The Dutch vote was not expected to have the same dramatic result for domestic politicians as France's referendum Sunday — a loss that was a public humiliation for President Jacques Chirac and resulted in Jean-Pierre Raffarin's resignation as prime minister.
Balkenende said before the vote that there would be no political resignations, no matter how the vote went. |
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| Jayx1 |
| I dont know but the Euro is down 2 canadian cents since monday. Which is good since im going there soon! |
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| ShadoWolf |
Excellent news!
They made the right choice for all the wrong reasons... but it's still the right choice. |
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| starsearcher |
| quote: | Originally posted by ShadoWolf
Excellent news! |
why? :conf: |
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: | | The Dutch vote was not expected to have the same dramatic result for domestic politicians as France's referendum Sunday — a loss that was a public humiliation for President Jacques Chirac and resulted in Jean-Pierre Raffarin's resignation as prime minister. |
I wish our prime minsiter had the same sort of dignity. |
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| ShadoWolf |
| quote: | Originally posted by starsearcher
why? :conf: |
This is a great day for anyone who believes in freedom. Basically, the EU Constitution removes government one step further from the people. It's a government electing another government. The people lose almost all power to Eurocrats.
Legally speaking, it's not even a constitution, it's just another treaty. It's not by the people for the people - it's by the bureaucrats for the bureaucrats.
Continental Europe has never been comfortable with democracy. The US imposed it in large parts of the Continent as a legacy of the end of World War II. The EU is their attempt at backsliding towards the medievalism of the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire)
In practice, under the EU Constitution a permanent bureaucracy in Brussels would grow like topsy, without any popular input or any other incentive for restraint. The money calls to the people in member nations would become irresistable, as would the bleating for the US to join Kyoto and consent to other mechanisms to transfer wealth from the productive to the unproductive.
In other words if you think the UN's bad now, look out! This one's big time.
Given our own experiences with the Charter, Part II of the European Constitution was particularly interesting. It is similar to our own charter, only much worse. Much worse. Judges would become legislators writ large.
The Charter is a granting of rights by the government, i.e. it's top down. In contrast, the U.S. Bill of Rights recognizes that legitimate government derives solely from the consent of the governed.
The EU Constitution would also prevent governments once and for all from putting an end to so-called "immigration" - which is actually a Muslim invasion of Europe.
Hopefully this will mark the end of France's domination of the EU. 
The EU can only work as a free trade area or customs union - not as a political union. |
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| ShadoWolf |
http://www.suntimes.com/output/stey...dt-steyn29.html
EU just won't take 'no' for an answer
May 29, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Following Sunday's vote in France, on Wednesday Dutch voters get to express their opinion on the proposed ''European Constitution.'' Heartening to see democracy in action, notwithstanding the European elite's hysterical warnings that, without the constitution, the continent will be set back on the path to Auschwitz. I haven't seen the official ballot, but the choice seems to be: "Check Box A to support the new constitution; check Box B for genocide and conflagration."
Alas, this tactic doesn't seem to have worked. So, a couple of days before the first referendum, Jean-Claude Juncker, the "president" of the European Union, let French and Dutch voters know how much he values their opinion:
"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," "President" Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.
Got that? You have the right to vote, but only if you give the answer your rulers want you to give. But don't worry, if you don't, we'll treat you like a particularly backward nursery school and keep asking the question until you get the answer right. Even America's bossiest nanny-state Democrats don't usually express their contempt for the will of the people quite so crudely.
Juncker is a man from Luxembourg, a country two-thirds the size of your rec room, and, under the agreeably clubby EU arrangements, he gets to serve as "president" without anything so tiresome as having to be voted into the job by "ordinary people." His remarks capture precisely the difference between the new Europe and the American republic.
Sick in bed a couple of months back, I started reading A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World by Will Hutton, and found it such a laugh I was soon hurling my medication away and doing cartwheels round the room. Hutton was a sort of eminence grise to Tony Blair, at least in his pre-warmongering pre-Bush-poodle phase. Hutton is the master of the dead language of statism that distinguishes the complacent Europhile from a good percentage of Americans, not all of them Republicans.
That said, even as a fully paid-up Eurobore, Hutton's at pains to establish how much he loves America: "I enjoy Sheryl Crow and Clint Eastwood alike, delight in Woody Allen . . .''
I'd wager he's faking at least two of these enthusiasms. As for the third, Woody Allen is the man the French government turned to for assistance with a commercial intended to restore their nation's image in America after anger at post-9/11 Gallic obstructionism began to have commercial implications for France. In the advertisement, Woody said he disliked the notion of renaming French fries ''freedom fries.'' What next, he wondered. Freedom kissing?
Despite the queasy mental image of Woody French-kissing, I'm with him on that one: If you don't like the phrase ''French fries,'' there's a perfectly good British word: ''chip.'' It conveniently covers both the menu item, and what the French have on their shoulder. That the French government could think that an endorsement by Woody Allen would improve their standing with the American people is itself a sad testament to the ever-widening Atlantic chasm. And that Will Hutton could think his appreciation of Woody is proof of his own pro-Americanism only widens the gap by another half-mile.
But, having brandished his credentials, Hutton says that it's his ''affection for the best of America that makes me so angry that it has fallen so far from the standards it expects of itself.'' The great Euro-thinker is not arguing that America is betraying the Founding Fathers, but that the Founding Fathers themselves got it hopelessly wrong. He compares the American and French Revolutions, and decides the latter was better because instead of the radical individualism of the 13 colonies the French promoted ''a new social contract.''
Well, you never know. It may be the defects of America's Founders that help explain why the United States has lagged so far behind France in technological innovation, economic growth, military performance, standard of living, etc. Entranced by his Europhilia, Hutton insists that "all western democracies subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are liberal or leftist."
Given that New Hampshire has been a continuous democracy for two centuries longer than Germany, this seems a doubtful proposition. It would be more accurate to say that almost all European nations subscribe to a broad family of ideas that are statist. Or, as Hutton has it, "the European tradition is much more mindful that men and women are social animals and that individual liberty is only one of a spectrum of values that generate a good society."
Precisely. And it's the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to what Hutton calls "the primacy of society" that has blighted the continent for over a century: Statism -- or "the primacy of society" -- is what fascism, Nazism, communism and now European Union all have in common. In fairness, after the first three, European Union seems a comparatively benign strain of the disease -- not a Blitzkrieg, just a Bitzkrieg, an accumulation of fluffy trivial pan-European laws that nevertheless takes for granted that the natural order is a world in which every itsy-bitsy activity is licensed and regulated and constitutionally defined by government.
That's why Will Hutton feels almost physically insecure when he's in one of the spots on the planet where the virtues of the state religion are questioned.
"In a world that is wholly private," he says of America, "we lose our bearings; deprived of any public anchor, all we have are our individual subjective values to guide us." He deplores the First Amendment and misses government-regulated media, which in the EU ensures that all public expression is within approved parameters (left to center-left). "Europe," he explains, "acts to ensure that television and radio conform to public interest criteria."
"Public interest criteria" doesn't mean criteria that the public decide is in their interest. It means that the elite -- via various appointed bodies -- decide what the public's interest is. Will Hutton is a member of the European elite, so that suits him fine. But it's never going to catch on in America -- I hope.
As European "president" Juncker spelled out to the French and Dutch electorates, a culture that subordinates the will of the people to the "primacy of society" is unlikely to take no for an answer. And, if you ignore referendum results, a frustrated citizenry turns to other outlets. |
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| ShadoWolf |
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB...2-email,00.html
Europe' Revisited
May 31, 2005
The European Union's constitutional treaty began life three-and-a-half years ago as an attempt to bring the EU "closer to its citizens." After Sunday's resounding defeat in France, of all places, the treaty may be said to have achieved a kind of ironic vindication.
The French vote is a victory of democracy against an opaque and elite process that few people really understood. It is also a defeat for those leaders, notably French President Jacques Chirac, who have been unable to deliver on what they promised from a united Europe. The defeat shouldn't be seen as a renunciation of "Europe" writ large, so much as for a particular narrow vision of the Continent.
The document itself is a monstrosity running to 485 pages. As a flavor of its character, consider that one of the treaty's "annexes and protocols" concerns the right of the Sami people to husband reindeer. The treaty was drafted by a convention called into existence in December 2001 and chaired by former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. The convention process was supposed to involve Europe's citizenry in its drafting, but in reality it droned on for two years in nigh-perfect anonymity.
The prevailing view among European elites was summed up by a senior EU bureaucrat we spoke to last month who said about the French and the constitution: "They haven't read it. If they had read it, they wouldn't understand it. If they understood it, they wouldn't like it." Nonetheless, he thought that the French should vote yes anyway.
Then, about six weeks ago, something unusual happened: Opinion polls suggested for the first time that the French referendum on ratification might fail. And even more remarkable, a debate erupted. It was messy and often uninformed, but at bottom people had started to ask themselves, what should the EU be?
In answering that question, the French may well have done the right thing for the wrong reason. The opposition included much of the political left, which derided the constitution as an ultra-liberal (in the classical sense of liberal), Anglo-Saxon thing, destined to strip Europe of its social-welfare model. At the same time, Mr. Chirac asserted that the constitution was France's only bulwark against the encroachment of Anglo-Saxon-style capitalism.
Meanwhile, Mr. Chirac's main political opponent in his own ruling party, Nicolas Sarkozy, argued for the constitution on the same grounds that the no camp argued against it -- that it would help France by forcing it to reform its bloated welfare state, create more jobs and increase economic growth. We think Mr. Chirac's view of the actual document is the closest to the truth -- that it would have enhanced the leverage of French socialism on the Continent -- which is why it's just as well that it was defeated.
Probably the underlying sentiment among "no" voters was their rejection of the paternalism with which this constitution, along with so many other EU initiatives, was sold to the public. Europeans are increasingly tired of being told to take their medicine and not ask too many questions. An AP story got to the heart of the matter in quoting one Emmanuel Zelez, a film editor, who said, "I voted 'no' because the text is very difficult to understand. Also, I'm afraid for democracy. The way the EU functions is very opaque. Many people there are not directly elected."
The French vote is also broadly helpful to American interests in Europe. At the margin the treaty would have made it easier to promote a common European foreign policy, and that would have meant the French and German view of Europe as a counterweight to American power. The constitution's failure will make it easier for the U.S. to fashion future coalitions of the willing.
One lesson Americans shouldn't draw, however, is that this is somehow a defeat for the common European currency, despite its 1% speculative fall against the dollar yesterday. The euro's impact may well have contributed to the French defeat by exposing the failure of socialist economic policies. The repudiation earlier this month of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats in their heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia had similar economic causes. The low-tax challenge from other European nations is precisely what many supporters of the euro, including us, had hoped for. The euro has been a liberalizing force in Europe, while the constitution was designed to be centralizing force.
Now that a genuine debate over the shape of the EU has begun in Europe, we hope it continues. The Dutch hold their referendum on the constitution tomorrow, and another rejection is expected. Once this document dies the death it deserves, the europhiles may conclude that the next time they draft a constitution they'll have to listen more closely to the people it purports to represent.
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The EU Constitution is the Eurocrats Full Employment Act. The unelected Brussels bureaucracy, which will have an opportunity to grow like mushrooms, and demand the money to make their spending good (similar to the UN) wants this very badly. Voters in a democracy would never tolerate the level of extravagant spending they have in mind. |
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| starsearcher |
| Ah...ok well makes sense... |
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| loca |
Some sort of constitution will pass eventually, we're just not ready for that just yet, there are too many issues between countries still to be resolved.
I'm kinda glad it got rejected though... damn french people trying to take over! |
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| walkindude |
They will have to make a UE now... hahahahah!!!
I know you were thinking it.... sorry, couldnt help my self :o
:o :clown: :o |
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| ShadoWolf |
| quote: | Originally posted by loca
damn french people trying to take over! |
that's the thing about the French: they don't want to part of an organization that they can't dominate.
DeGaulle didn't control D-Day operations --> only 177 French soldiers participated in D-Day
France couldn't dominate NATO --> France left NATO (military structure)
couldn't control the EU, esp. with the new eastern European countries --> French rejected EU constitution
ironicly, they said they rejected it for other reasons:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4538249.stm
An Anglo-Saxon takeover of the EU?
Paul Reynolds
By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs correspondent BBC News website
A charge often made against the proposed EU constitution by its opponents in France is that it is an "Anglo-Saxon" document - a plot to enshrine Thatcherite policies which will devastate the social balance of European economies.
As an example, they point to the phrase used in Article I-3 (2) which states that there shall be "an internal market where competition is free and undistorted".
One of the leading French critics, Socialist Senator Jean-Luc Melenchon, commented in a recent radio interview: "This is the law of the jungle turned into a constitution. I do not want a constitution that imposes a principle - free and unfettered competition - with which I do not agree." :stongue: :stongue: :stongue:
For such critics the word "competition" represents all that is worst about what they see as free-market, "neo-liberal" principles laid down by the constitution for the EU.
Damn those Anglo-Saxon pigs, with their "free markets" and their low unemployment and their "innovation." :stongue: |
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