Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty
When the EU Heads of Governments meet in Brussels and afterwards dish their standard rhetoric repertoire out to non-critical journalists during the press conferences in the building of the Council in Rue de la Loi in Brussels, many EU citizens turn a deaf ear to it. Supposedly there are prominent people among them: such as the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who once mentioned: “I share the anger at the enthusiastic Sunday speeches, that politicians give with the regularity appropriate for church feasts, even though they do not manage to make the rules of their cooperation efficient.”
By “rules” he meant the Lisbon Treaty. Despite the French, Dutch and Irish “no”, the only thing the heads of governments still debate is how this excessive body of legislation can be ratified, by hook or by crook. Meanwhile the fact, that the alleged Constitution does not provide an adequate answer to question what the EU should do in order to become a role model in the international politics as a homogeneous actor, is being neglected. Even worse than that, the “Lisbon Treaty does not settle the internal problems of the EU”, it seals and cements the “distant elite politics of the EU” and the prerogative of the governments to decide upon the fate of Europe behind closed doors, “as the German Philosopher Jürgen Habermas phrases this.
Since the conference in Laeken in December 2001 a big chance was missed. The conference could have been an excellent opportunity to make the European citizens and the extremely complex international organization based on the rules of the foreign policy merge in a purposeful synthesis by fair referenda. It would have been a chance to emotionally bind the citizens to the elite project and establish a democracy of European citizens. But still another decision was taken.
The US Constitution begins with the following words, “We the People”. This means that the nation came first, then the Constitution and then the state was founded. Thus only a nation is entitled to decide upon, constitutional matters. This is the core principle of the so-called national sovereignty. If this basic rule of democratic thought had been followed from the very beginning, the EU would not have found itself in such a precarious deadlock. The big chance to establish an emotional tie between the citizens and the European Union has thus been gambled way.
The politicians of SPÖ, ÖVP and the Greens fooled the citizens with the arguments about Europe-wide referenda instead of national referenda. Seemingly they all advocated a Europe-wide referendum. But again it was only a make-believe, for no steps were undertaken. The former EU Parliamentarian Johannes Voggenhuber blamed the then Federal Chancellor for taking no measures in the government conference to achieve this goal. In the meantime he confesses that the idea of a pan-European referendum was just a “vision”, for the implementation of which “legal basis should have been created in the Lisbon Treaty”. So it was just a pure fiction, which makes the citizens feel even more alienated.
Instead, a national referendum would have been politically manageable. In October 2007, long before the big protests in Austria, the author of the article was among the pioneers to organise a “democracy tent” at Bellhausplatz in Vienna together with Hans Peter Martin. The aim of this event with more than 2000 participants within a week was a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. During the press conference the then longest-serving EU MEP – the Danish Jen-Peter Bonde was among the guests.
Instead of following the will of the people and realizing the constitutional necessity, the official politics in Austria denies a national referendum. At the same time it demands a second referendum in Ireland. Successful politics and the closeness to citizens certainly look different.
