According to the Slovenian constitutional court, the referendum ‘would have caused unconstitutional consequences’. How? The court conceded a constitutional right to a referendum, but claimed that its execution would endanger other constitutional values that should be given priority in an economic crisis: the efficient functioning of the state apparatus, especially in creating conditions for economic growth; the realisation of human rights, especially the rights to social security and to free economic initiative.
In short, in assessing the consequences of the referendum, the court simply accepted as fact that failing to obey the dictates of international financial institutions (or to meet their expectations) can lead to political and economic crisis, and is thus unconstitutional. To put it bluntly: since meeting these dictates and expectations is the condition of maintaining the constitutional order, they have priority over the constitution (and eo ipso state sovereignty).
No wonder, then, that the Court’s decision shocked many legal specialists. Dr France Bučar, an old dissident and one of the fathers of Slovene independence, pointed out that, following the logic the CC used in this case, it can prohibit any referendum, since every such act has social consequences: ‘With this decision, the constitutional judges issued to themselves a blank check allowing them to prohibit anything anyone can concoct. Since when does the CC have the right to assess the state of economy or bank institutions? It can assess only if a certain legal regulation is in accord with the constitution or not. That’s it!’ There effectively can be a conflict between different rights guaranteed by constitution: say, if a group of people proposes an openly racist referendum, asking the people to endorse a law endorsing police torture, it should undoubtedly be prohibited. However, the reason for prohibition is in this case a direct conflict of the principle promoted by the referendum with other articles of the constitution; while in the Slovene case, the reason for prohibition does not concern principles, but (possible) pragmatic consequences of an economic measure.
Slovenia may be a small country, but this decision is a symptom of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like todays, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide – they are unaware of the catastrophic consequences that would ensue if their demands were to be met. This line of argument is not new. In a TV interview a couple of years ago, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust for democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a ‘valley of tears’. After the breakdown of socialism, one cannot directly pass to the abundance of a successful market economy: limited, but real, socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessarily painful. The same goes for western Europe, where the passage from the post-second world war welfare state to new global economy involves painful renunciations, less security, less guaranteed social care. For Dahrendorf, the problem is encapsulated by the simple fact that this painful passage through the ‘valley of tears’ lasts longer than the average period between elections, so that the temptation is to postpone the difficult changes for the short-term electoral gains.
For him, the paradigm here is the disappointment of the large strata of post-communist nations with the economic results of the new democratic order: in the glorious days of 1989, they equated democracy with the abundance of western consumerist societies; and 20 years later, with the abundance still missing, they now blame democracy itself.
Unfortunately, Dahrendorf focuses much less on the opposite temptation: if the majority resist the necessary structural changes in the economy, would one of the logical conclusions not be that, for a decade or so, an enlightened elite should take power, even by non-democratic means, to enforce the necessary measures and thus lay the foundations for truly stable democracy?
Along these lines, the journalist Fareed Zakaria pointed out how democracy can only ‘catch on’ in economically developed countries. If developing countries are ‘prematurely democratised’, the result is a populism that ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism – no wonder that today’s economically most successful third world countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule. And, furthermore, does this line of thinking not provide the best argument for the authoritarian regime in China?
What is new today is that, with the financial crisis that began in 2008, this same distrust of democracy – once constrained to the third world or post-communist developing countries – is gaining ground in the developed west itself: what was a decade or two ago patronising advice to others now concerns ourselves.
The least one can say is that this crisis offers proof that it is not the people but experts themselves who do not know what they are doing. In Western Europe we are effectively witnessing a growing inability of the ruling elite – they know less and less how to rule. Look at how Europe is dealing with the Greek crisis: putting pressure on Greece to repay debts, but at the same time ruining its economy through imposed austerity measures and thereby making sure that the Greek debt will never be repaid.
At the end of October last year, the IMF itself released research showing that the economic damage from aggressive austerity measures may be as much as three times larger than previously assumed, thereby nullifying its own advice on austerity in the eurozone crisis. Now the IMF admits that forcing Greece and other debt-burdened countries to reduce their deficits too quickly would be counterproductive, but only after hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost because of such ‘miscalculations’.
And therein resides the true message of the ‘irrational’ popular protests all around Europe: the protesters know very well what they don’t know; they don’t pretend to have fast and easy answers; but what their instinct is telling them is nonetheless true – that those in power also don’t know it. In Europe today, the blind are leading the blind.
Srećko Horvat
4 WHY THE EU NEEDS CROATIA MORE THAN CROATIA NEEDS THE EU
When in late 2005 the accession negotiations between Croatia and the EU officially started, a leading Croatian liberal daily triumphantly published the following headline all over its front page: ‘Bye, bye Balkans!’ At that time, this was the prevailing and typical stance towards the European Union: some sort of ‘self-fulfilling mythology’ of the Balkans as a region needing to be ‘civilised’ by integration into the West. Only eight years later, as Croatia finally becomes part of the European Union, neither the EU nor the Balkans has the same image anymore. Today’s situation is somehow reminiscent of the famous joke about a patient whose doctor makes him choose whether to hear the bad or the good news first. Of course, the patient chooses first to hear the bad news. ‘The bad news is you have cancer,’ says the doctor, ‘but don’t worry, the good news is you have Alzheimer’s, so when you get home you will already have forgotten about the first predicament.’ Doesn’t that sound just like the situation with Croatia’s EU accession, where the bad news is that Croatia is experiencing a political and economic crisis, with corruption affairs erupting almost on a daily basis and unemployment rates rising as well, and the good news is: ‘Don’t worry, you will enter the EU’?
‘A clear majority in favour of EU accession’ is how the teletext of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation reported on the referendum in Croatia regarding the country’s EU membership. And indeed, two-thirds of the votes cast said ‘Yes’. But taking into account the historically low turnout in the referendum of 43 per cent, this means that actually not more than 29 per cent of the population entitled to vote spoke out in favour of EU accession. On the eve of Croatia’s EU referendum, the former war general Ante Gotovina, recently released from his ICTY prison cell in The Hague, and who had once been the biggest obstacle to the Croatian negotiations with the EU, sent an epistle to the Croatian people urging them to vote in favour of the EU. At the same time, the two biggest Croatian parties, the Social Democrats (SDP), now in power, and the Conservatives (HDZ), the former ruling party, together with the Croatian Catholic Church, did everything to convince the voters that ‘there is no alternative.’
Only a few days before the