Regardless of the eventual ratification of the new treaty in 1993, thanks to a Danish referendum revote overriding its initial No to the treaty, Maastricht was to become emblematic of an emerging rift between the “new Europe” and large strata of the EU citizenry. For the EU leadership this constituted a development of great concern, a fact that was to be emphatically confirmed in countless public statements and initiatives throughout the 1990s. Hence, the European Commission took great pains to stress that the Union “depends for its very legitimacy on its citizens” (Commission of the European Communities 1993a: 15; henceforward abbreviated as CEC); and that the “penalty for failure” to gain the citizens’ confidence “is that citizenship of the Union may appear to be a distant concept for citizens engendering confusion as to its means and objectives even fuelling anti-EU feelings” (CEC 1997a: 1). Maastricht, as Wallace and Smith (1995: 150–151) argue, thus meant that not only had “the democratic credentials of European integration” come under public scrutiny; it had also “forced European elites to accept that public support for further integration could not be taken for granted” (see also Beetham and Lord 1998: 15).
A Harrowing Option
There can be no gainsaying that the experiences from the early 1990s made clear that popular consent to further integration had to be earned, rather than simply assumed. What was made much less clear, though, was the extent to which “European elites” would be ready to “accept” popular discontent and thus bow to the fact that their subsequent plans for “further integration” might fail to earn sufficient popular consent. Today, some fifteen years after the Maastricht ratification crisis, this latter question still lingers unanswered; and we take it to be no wild guess that the failure to provide an unambiguous answer goes some way to explain why successive EU referenda, on the whole, have turned out to be such distressing, even harrowing events. By not answering the question in favor of the verdict of the popular vote, European elites have instead retained the (pre-democratic) option to nullify the vote at will, by for instance forcing revotes, as in the Irish case in 2008–9, or, as in the case of the Franco-Dutch No to the EU’s Constitutional Treaty in 2005, by simply applying cosmetic changes. This option, it seems, has not only proven harrowing for voters. That is, once decision makers start to eye the option—always in breach of pre-election promises to the contrary—they are also forced to reframe the referenda in terms of a moral choice, rather than a political one. (In reality, all the referenda on the EU so far have undoubtedly been formulated as political choices, formally speaking, some add “technical” choices, but never have they been formally designed as moral choices.) As borne out by practically all the post-referenda debates up until now, the reason for overturning a popular judgment is thus primarily motivated with a more or less implicit reference to a moral imperative. The popular verdict gets disqualified not because it is deemed politically unfeasible, but because it is deemed morally reprehensible. Hence, voters throwing wrenches into the EU works are branded as ungrateful, selfish, racist, nationalist, intolerant, ignorant, lazy, irresponsible, and so on and so forth. This is where it gets harrowing also for “European elites,” since we must assume that most of them know full well that this type of obvious manipulation always tends to backfire. As The Economist (2008) noted, commenting on the debate following upon the Irish referendum: “Why would Irish mainstream politicians want to scapegoat immigration, and paint their own voters as intolerant? Perhaps because they know that they ran a wretched yes campaign.” For students of European integration, this is also where we can get a sense of the enormous stakes involved in the European integration of today, of the enormous public credibility gaps that the EU’s political leaderships are prepared to open up in order to have their will.
EU Referenda and the Politics of EU Citizenship
Since these stakes were nowhere more evident than in the debates surrounding the French and Dutch referenda on the EU’s Constitutional Treaty in 2005—where a high turnout of voters overwhelmingly said No to the political proposal put before them—we also need to take a moment to reflect on what took place here. While this book is not about EU referenda per se, we take the referendum’s character, as a rare medium whereby citizens are put in direct political contact with the EU project, to be offering exceptionally pertinent clues as to the meaning and content of EU citizenship. That is to say, the referenda and the reactions they engender provide exceptionally good starting points for reflection on the various and often contradictory and situation-specific registers of EU citizenship—specifying the traits distinguishing an “ideal,” or “model,” EU citizen—that EU institutions, political leaders and other influential actors decide to make use of, or not make use of, in different contexts.
In line with our account above, the approach adopted by Brussels, governments, and most other elite voices to the French and Dutch referenda was very much articulated in moral terms, thus seeing little merit in discussing the outcome as an expression of a conscious political choice, based on what voters took the Constitutional Treaty to stand for in a political sense. The refusal to take the No vote for a political answer was underscored too by the fact that the results had barely been made public before the news media was brimming with voices asking what it was that people actually had voted No to. While the answers provided were many and varied the great majority of them agreed on a basic message that held the No vote in more or less moral contempt. As would be the case in the subsequent debate on the Irish referendum, voters were depicted as ignorant, uninformed, anti-immigration, intolerant, nationalist, and as inimical to globalization, “open economies,” and “employment-friendly” labor markets.
In contrast to the Irish case, though, the commentary on the French and Dutch referenda, both prior to and after the elections, was much more prone to depict the No side as anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and racist. In particular, No voters were made out to be hostile to labor migrants from the new Eastern and Central European member states, epitomized by “the Polish plumber,” as well as to a Turkish EU membership. True, such sentiments did exist among those voting No—as they did exist among those voting Yes (see e.g. Hainsworth 2006). But the allegation that virulent xenophobia, racism, and the like had a significant impact on the solid majority of the No voters—made up of leftists and greens in both France and the Netherlands—was at best the cry of a sore loser.3 Above all, what these accusations in effect served to achieve was to relocate the referenda beyond the pale of liberal democracy. Like in previous and subsequent ones, the referenda were rather cast as inverted votes of moral confidence; instead of respecting citizens’ free political choice to decide whether or not they had confidence in the proposal put before them, it was governments, Brussels, and scores of pundits, intellectuals, and corporate voices who, in the end, decided to declare the great majority of voters morally incapacitated. Accordingly, you were either with the enlightened (some would say cosmopolitan) Europeans, or you were with the bigoted nationalists.
In essence, such was also the message from Jürgen Habermas—European post-nationalism’s most renowned interpreter—who, together with a group of other intellectuals, called on voters to do the right thing and vote Yes: “We owe it to the millions and millions of victims of our senseless wars and criminal dictatorships” (quoted in Watkins 2005: 7). “If we look at Auschwitz,” said the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, “we know why we must accept the European Constitution” (quoted in European Citizen Action Service 2006: 14). First vice president of the European Commission, Margot Wallström, issued a similar admonition when