{news} Fw: USGP-INT Why French And Dutch Citizens Are Saying No to EU Constitution

[Justine McCabe]

Fyi,
Justine
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Feinstein" <mfeinstein at feinstein.org>
To: <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 12:35 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Why French And Dutch Citizens Are Saying No to EU 
Constitution


> Dear all
>
> How do we understand the European Greens position on the EU Constitution, 
> in light of the "Non" vote in France and the "Nee" vote in the 
> Netherlands?
>
> 1)  In the Winter issue of Green Pages, I did the following story on the 
> official position of The European Greens
>
> http://gp.org/greenpages/content/volume9/issue1/article15.php
>
> This story also has a link to the text of the EuroGreens official 
> statement on the matter.
>
>
> 2)  Here is a press release issued yesterday by the European Greens on the 
> French and Dutch votes
>
> http://www.europeangreens.org/news/press.html#09
>
>
> 3)  Finally, the following piece in ZMagazine below includes references to 
> European Green Party positions on the EU Constitution.  Even though the 
> piece was written before the votes were taken, it has many helpful 
> insights:
>
>
> http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=7997
>
> Why French And Dutch Citizens Are Saying No
>  by  Susan George
>  and  Erik Wesselius
> June 03, 2005
> Transnational Institute
>
>
> The French referendum on the EU constitution takes place on 29 May, 
> followed by a similar referendum in The Netherlands on 1 June. Opinions 
> polls show the 'no' side edging ahead, but in both countries it's still 
> too close to call. The following virtual interview is based on 
> presentations given at the Transnational Institute (TNI) Fellows' Meeting 
> in Amsterdam on 21 May. Paris-based Susan George (SG) is TNI Associate 
> Director, Vice-President of Attac France and an active campaigner against 
> the constitution. Erik Wesselius (EW) is a researcher at Corporate Europe 
> Observatory and the Secretary of the Comité Grondwet Nee (Dutch Committee 
> for the NO Vote) in The Netherlands.
>
>
> What is the state of public opinion in France and in The Netherlands at 
> this moment?
>
> EW: It's not just a slight majority opposed to the treaty in The 
> Netherlands, according to the latest polls. Last week the polls were 
> indeed still fifty-fifty between the yes and the no, but the polls that 
> came out yesterday and today show between 60 per cent and 64 per cent for 
> the no. So, we see there's been a huge development during the last week, 
> which I think has a lot to do with the fact that the Dutch government is 
> campaigning very strongly in favour of the constitution. Although I'm 
> sceptical of opinions polls, I'm more and more convinced that this is 
> really happening. I had never imagined when we started our campaign that 
> it would have developed in this direction.
>
> SG: Although the number of undecided people is going down steadily - you 
> know the polls are just about neck and neck in France as well - people are 
> worried about what happens afterwards, because the government has been 
> leaning on the chaos argument. Our answer to that is 'well no, you just go 
> back to where you are today. We currently have the Nice treaty and in the 
> past there has been a treaty about every three years, so there is no 
> reason to think this won't keep going on as usual'. But this time we won't 
> turn back, because there has been a major public debate and people are now 
> far more aware of what European policies actually are. So now we can have 
> a genuine debate about which direction we want to go.
>
> What are your main criticisms of the constitution?
>
> SG: Valérie Giscard d'Estaing, a former president of France, was named as 
> head of the constitutional convention that produced this document. The 
> members of the convention, 105 of them, were named from above, they were 
> appointed. About two thirds of them were either European or national 
> parliamentarians, but they were not elected by the citizens to do this. 
> Then there were some others supposedly representing civil society. So 
> that's the first criticism: the non-democratic aspect. A constitutional 
> convention is normally an elected body, so that it comes in a sense from 
> the people. This constitution does not come from the people; it comes from 
> an appointed group.
>
> EW: I could talk about this for hours, but the main basic message is that 
> this constitution is not democratic and that if we accept it we could be 
> left with an absolutely inadequate situation for the next 20 years or so. 
> I think that's very dangerous for the future of European co-operation. The 
> second basic argument is that a constitution should be readable and 
> accessible to the population. It should not be a document of 480 pages, 
> with some 400 more pages of appendixes and declarations. That's really 
> crazy.
>
> SG: The members of the convention worked for about two years and were only 
> supposed to deal with the balances of power, as you would normally do in a 
> constitution. Besides this, they were supposed to constitutionalise the 
> Charter, a fundamental declaration of rights which had been placed in the 
> Nice Treaty but had not been formalised beyond that. Then, for reasons 
> that I am not really clear on, Giscard d'Estaing himself decided to 
> include part three, which is around three quarters of the document and 
> which is this whole list of very detailed policies.
>
> EW: This document contains a lot of policy. It includes a whole chapter on 
> economic policies basically fixing Europe on a neo-liberal framework. That 
> kind of stuff should not be present in a constitution because if the 
> European governments would like to subsequently change that policy choice 
> it would not be possible, it would be anti-constitutional. So that's very 
> dangerous and very easy to explain to people. The inclusion of this whole 
> chapter on neo-liberal policies in the constitution is one of our main 
> points of critique.
>
> Another important criticism is the militarisation of the EU. The document 
> includes key articles saying that the member states of the EU will improve 
> their military capabilities every year. This has been turned around by 
> part of the left, who say that improving doesn't necessarily mean spending 
> more, but if you know where these proposals come from then you get 
> worried. They are the product of a working group which included several 
> representatives of the European military industry, and who want to sell 
> their goods. That's why they were very happy to have these paragraphs in 
> the European constitution.
>
> SG: Part three includes a whole list of policies in every area, 
> agriculture, environment, police co-operation, justice, the central bank, 
> etc. But the main thing is, however, that the objectives of the union 
> define it as an economic space where you have freedoms of movement for 
> goods, services, people and capital, and a space in which competition is 
> free and unhindered. Competition comes into the text 47 times, the word 
> market 78 times, the phrase social progress is not mentioned at all, or 
> once I guess, and unemployment is not mentioned at all.
>
> We have many objections to the content of this document, but the major one 
> is that this text is not amendable, is not revisable. It's not amendable 
> because you need a triple unanimity across all 25 countries. To amend the 
> constitution there first has to be a convention, which has to reach a 
> consensus. Then they hand the baby to the heads of government, who also 
> have to be unanimous in agreeing the proposed changes. Then it goes into a 
> process like the one we are going through now, of either parliamentary 
> approval or referendums, and that also has to be unanimous otherwise the 
> constitution cannot be changed. So it is considered by anybody who has 
> read the thing to be virtually impossible to amend.
>
> How have the French and the Dutch governments reacted to the no campaign?
>
> SG: The French government uses the argument that there is no 'Plan B', and 
> that just because France says no that doesn't mean that the other 
> governments will be willing to renegotiate. Our response to that is that 
> somebody has got to put a stop to this and, legally, if France votes no 
> this document is out. It's out for everyone.
>
> President Jacques Chirac also says 'we will be the black sheep of Europe.' 
> The government are trying to make people believe we would be living under 
> a different law from the rest of Europe, that everybody else would have 
> the constitution but we would have something different, and they have been 
> confusing this with a new article that says that any state has the right 
> to leave Europe. So they are promoting ambiguity on this point.
>
> But in fact we feel that after the vote there would be a great deal of 
> time for debate and that the balance of power would change drastically. If 
> we win that means that the Socialist leadership is discredited, the 
> president is discredited and the prime minister too - the result will be 
> political upheaval throughout French politics. Then we can also have a 
> real debate about what we want next with our comrades in other countries. 
> That is what should happen. But first we have to say no, this is not the 
> model we want for Europe and the world.
>
> EW: In Holland they have just approved a special budget of four million 
> euro to campaign for the yes, because they were very afraid of the no. We 
> have initiated a court case to either demand that this money is not spent, 
> or that the no campaign should get equal access to the media and equal 
> amounts of money, because this is completely out of proportion. The no 
> campaign has had 400,000 euro in total, and that has been spread over a 
> number of groups. My own group, which is the main active group campaigning 
> for the no, only got 30,000 euro, so we can compare our 30,000 with their 
> four million.
>
> Anyway, I think we can be happy that the government is so disliked by the 
> Dutch population at this moment, because it has been implementing hard 
> line neo-liberal social policies. There were a lot of trade union 
> demonstrations at the end of last year and I think that what we see now in 
> this clear shift toward the no is a kind of pay-off.
>
> SG: I would like to thank former European Commissioner Frits Bolkenstein, 
> a former member of the Dutch government, for coming to France and 
> defending his directive, which is about the freedom of movement of 
> services and about how the laws of the country of origin apply and not the 
> law of the country in which a service is rendered. And he said he didn't 
> believe in all this referendum stuff, that people were elected to vote on 
> these things and they just should be allowed to get on with it, and that 
> ordinary people should not be involved in this debate. So that was a real 
> help. That was a big boost to us.
>
> EW: The Dutch government has made a lot of public relation mistakes. One 
> of the main governing parties, the Liberals, made a TV advertisement in 
> which they showed some pictures of Auschwitz, Srebrenica - which is a big 
> Dutch trauma - and then the Madrid bombings, and the concluding message 
> was 'we need an EU constitution to make Europe better and safer.' So 
> afterwards the Liberals thought 'oh well, maybe it is not such a good idea 
> to broadcast this,' but unfortunately for them the clips were already 
> circulating on the internet. This is a good example of how the government 
> is completely lacking arguments to sell the constitution. They are really 
> falling back on empty statements about why Europe is so important.
>
> SG: The French government is pulling out all the stops. They are 
> panicking. The business people had said 'we are not going to actively 
> campaign because we think it wouldn't be a good idea, it might be 
> counterproductive.' But this week over a hundred major business leaders 
> have signed an appeal for a yes vote. The defence minister has said: 'if 
> you don't vote for the yes, Europe will be shot to hell.' They are really 
> panicking. Chirac appeared on TV with a group of carefully selected young 
> people, and two members of ATTAC were thrown out because they said they 
> were too partisan. So the remaining kids were supposed to be very obedient 
> and nice, but they asked questions about our future that Chirac wasn't 
> able to answer, and the polls for the no went up after that. So we thank 
> Chirac too. And then there's the prime minister. Every time he goes on TV 
> it helps us.
>
> People are also voting against the expression of neo-liberalism in France 
> that they have been suffering since the present government was elected in 
> 2002.
>
> How and why did you begin to work around the referendum?
>
> EW: We started about one and half years ago. Basically, we were a group of 
> people coming from a broadly left perspective who had been working on EU 
> issues for a long time. I have been working on EU issues from the 
> mid-1990s and was involved in the alternative summit in 1997 during the 
> negotiations for the Amsterdam Treaty.
>
> We sat together and strategised on how to approach this referendum 
> question and how to ensure that it would not be possible for the 
> government to say 'when you say no you are a xenophobe,' which would have 
> put us in the same corner as the right-wing populists.
>
> SG: The French debate on the constitution began in a rather low-key way. 
> We haven't been working on it for one and half years, but we have been 
> working on it since last summer. ATTAC brought out a list of 21 demands to 
> the intergovernmental conference in 2004, none of which was satisfied, 
> except that equality between men and women was put in the objectives, but 
> that was only one out of 21 demands; the others were not satisfied. Then a 
> process began which I can't really explain, because this is the biggest 
> debate we have had in France since 1968. I don't know where this comes 
> from. It must be the fact that nobody has been asked to give his or her 
> opinion about Europe in the last 13 years. The last time was around 
> Maastricht, in 1992, and they kept saying (the government and Giscard 
> d'Estaing and the people who wrote the constitution) 'well, don't worry 
> about part three, this is not really the issue, that is just a recap of 
> all the things that were in the previous treaties, so you have been living 
> under that and you will be living under it.' But people didn't really know 
> Europe was all encapsulated, all written down in a single document. Our 
> adversaries never quoted the text. Once you start to quote it, and people 
> find out what's actually in this and find out what's going to be 
> constitutionalised and not revisable and not amendable, they get scared to 
> death.
>
> In terms of organising against the constitution, that really began with 
> the 'call of the 200', which was a document signed by 200 people coming 
> from different parts of the left, including movements, trade unions, 
> parties, etc. That spearheaded the formation of collectives all over 
> France. Now there are between 800 and 900 grassroots collectives at the 
> departmental level, city level, or sometimes even smaller. These 
> collectives have been organising debates all over the country. I have been 
> in debates ranging from 100 to 5000 participants. The right gets nowhere 
> near these kind of crowds.
>
> EW: At the start of our campaign we wanted to involve social movements and 
> NGOs. Our idea was to form a kind of platform as we had done at the time 
> of the 1997 counter-summit, the European summit from below, but we found 
> out that none of the NGOs was ready to take a real position on the 
> constitution. In particular, they were afraid to publicly opt for the no 
> side. So basically it was impossible for us to form that kind of 
> coalition.
>
> We then decided to focus on influencing the terms of the debate. We began 
> by writing articles on the constitution ourselves, and we also asked some 
> people from different political origins, for example from the Social 
> Democrat party and the Green party, to do the same. So, we even have 
> pieces written by members of parties that support the yes vote, plus 
> content analysis and criticisms of the constitution gathered in one book. 
> We also produced other kind of materials, such as a brochure in which we 
> outline our main objections against the constitution. And I think that has 
> been very important, because from the right-wing side there has been no 
> good content, there has been almost no content, and I think that has been 
> a great advantage for us.
>
> SG: We have produced a lot of materials. Books about the constitution are 
> best-sellers. ATTAC produced a little book with a picture of Chirac 
> together with Francois Roland, who is the general secretary of the 
> Socialist party, on the cover of a popular weekly called Match. The 
> headline was 'they said yes to each other.' You know, it looks like a gay 
> wedding, and we have a picture of them ice-skating together and they say 
> yes to each other. In this booklet we answered all the arguments of the 
> Socialist party and the centre-right UMP. This sold 38,000 copies in the 
> first week. Then we brought out another book which explains the 
> Constitution step by step.
>
> Not every criticism of the constitution comes from the progressive camp. 
> What other political forces are supporting the no vote?
>
> EW: Part of the right is mobilising around this issue, and they have been 
> campaigning for the no as well, but until now it's amazing that we have 
> been able to get more media coverage than them. Until this week it was 
> basically only our voice that was arguing for a no vote in the media. Now 
> Geert Wilders, a right-wing populist politician, is touring with a bus, so 
> that generates some media attention for him, but still it's impossible for 
> the government to say that if you oppose the constitution then you must be 
> a right-wing xenophobe.
>
> SG: I think the yes side is the one advocating a pure and hardline 
> neo-liberalism. It's about taking Europe into an American model in which 
> there is little social protection, and there is competition of everybody 
> against everybody. Public services would be hugely downgraded, free 
> education and free health could be very seriously hit. So the yes side is 
> really offering an American model of competition, in which it's the market 
> that decides and there is very little politics. The people will be 
> dispossessed of the possibility to decide much of anything.
>
> The European Left is divided around this issue. Why are some political 
> parties supporting the yes vote?
>
> EW: In The Netherlands the Green Left party says yes to the constitution. 
> So the only left party campaigning for a no vote is the Socialist party.
>
> The Green party argues that although this is not an ideal treaty, it makes 
> some progress in terms of improving democracy at the EU level. Their 
> evaluation is also that, within the current political context, if you have 
> a renegotiation there is little chance that anything better will come out. 
> They are saying that the treaty will make Europe better at dealing with 
> unemployment, that it contains lots of improvements on environmental 
> policy, etc. We think that these claims are very questionable, but that's 
> their line of argument.
>
> SG: I see a lot of similarities between The Netherlands and France. The 
> Socialists had an internal party referendum and the leadership came out 
> long ago for the yes (it was about 60-40). The result is that the 
> Socialists are now split, because two major figures in the party 
> leadership have come out for the no. One is the former prime minister 
> Laurent Fabius, and another, Henri Emmanuelli, leads a tendency which is 
> the furthest to the left. The party leadership has accused them of playing 
> the game of the far-right fascists, and they have been insulted and 
> vilified by their own party. This does not go down too well with the rank 
> and file. In every poll, more than 50 per cent of people who identify 
> themselves as Socialists say they will vote no. The same thing goes for 
> the Greens.
>
> How do you respond to arguments defending the alleged progressive aspects 
> of the Constitution?
>
> SG: Part one of the constitution is about the distribution of power and 
> also contains the military clauses. It says very clearly that NATO is 
> going to be the major component of the defence of states which belong to 
> the EU. That's in part one, but still the European Parliament does not 
> have the power to initiate legislation or to raise taxes, and it has none 
> of the powers of a normal parliament in a normal country.
>
> Part two is the fundamental charter of rights. Many people have problems 
> with this, particularly in France, because it's regressive compared to the 
> French constitution and to other constitutions that have been written 
> since the 18th century, including the initial declaration of the rights of 
> men and women. One of the clauses of the charter, for instance, says you 
> have the right to look for a job but not that you have the right to work. 
> Work is not treated as a fundamental right. But the right to work is the 
> basic grounding of unemployment compensation, so this is a very serious 
> regression. There are others. Many women feel that the simple mention that 
> 'everyone has the right to life' without any mention of women's gains in 
> various countries is a serious omission, and feel that this section was so 
> worded because in various countries, including Portugal and Ireland, there 
> is no right to control over fertility, abortion, etc.
>
> There are various other things that seem regressive to us and at the end 
> of the charter it states 'this creates no new tasks or obligations for the 
> EU and any court decision about it is not a claimable right.' In other 
> words, court decisions cannot enforce claimable rights. They can only 
> decide whether the constitution is being applied or not.
>
> EW: Our main argument is basically the democracy argument, so in response 
> to what the Green party is saying we acknowledge that there are some small 
> improvements, such as the fact that European Parliament in getting a bit 
> more say over EU policies in some fields. Transparency in the Council of 
> Ministers will be slightly improved as well. But - there's always a 'but' 
> going with these improvements - if you talk about transparency in the 
> Council you must consider that most of the Council decisions are prepared 
> in committees. The almost a thousand committees that exist today will 
> remain as un-transparent as they are now. There's absolutely no scrutiny 
> about what they are doing, and that situation will not be changed by the 
> constitution.
>
> The European Parliament has over the years got more powers, but still you 
> cannot compare it with your national parliament. The first thing is that 
> there are no real parties: there are groups in the EU Parliament which 
> some people think are parties, like the Social Democrats or the Christian 
> Democrat group, but these do not really function as parties, they are just 
> a conglomerate of national fractions which operate under an umbrella. 
> There have been some attempts by the Greens, for example, to create a 
> European Green party, but those are very provisional. So in that sense we 
> have a very peculiar kind of politics, and it's even more peculiar because 
> you don't have a government with a political party composition. Each 
> country nominates its own Commissioner and the Commission behaves as a 
> kind of government, but you don't have the normal dynamics between 
> governing parties and opposition parties that you'd see in a 
> representative democracy.
>
> SG: We also use the argument of democracy and the fact that economic 
> policies are instruments that should not be in a constitutional document. 
> There is a double executive proposed in the constitution: one is the 
> Commission, which is defined as the only entity which can define the 
> common good, that's its job. And then there is a single president, who is 
> elected for a renewable term of two and a half years. But that seems to be 
> a recipe for in-fighting between two different sources of executive power. 
> In other words, they get rid of the six-months rotating presidency, where 
> it can go to Finland and then to Greece, and then to Ireland and so on. So 
> they get rid of that, which may be a good thing, but in a way which 
> doesn't seem to be very productive.
>
> Overall, though, our argument comes back to neo-liberalism. When the 
> constitution was handed by the convention to the heads of states and 
> governments, their additions and subtractions made it even more 
> neo-liberal than it was when it came out of the hands of the convention. 
> Perhaps that reflects the governments of Europe as they are today. But it 
> becomes a problem because it is extremely difficult to change this 
> constitution. As the 1793 French constitution says, 'One generation should 
> not subject future generations to its laws.'
>
> People who have actually read the text of the constitution almost always 
> come out of this difficult exercise determined to vote against it, despite 
> the official financial and media propaganda for the yes vote, which says 
> 'its more democratic than what we had'.
>
> If we lose the vote in France it will be a historic defeat. But I have 
> faith in the intelligence of the French people and I think we can win.
>
> Edited by Daniel Chavez, with additional editing by Oscar Reyes
>