Eurealist :: Main Page: “View Article An insult to French and Dutch voters
by Eurealist on May 26, 2005 05:19PM (BST)
A comment on Margot Walltrom Blog from Hero von Esens
Dear Commissioner,
One of the many difficulties with the “constitutional debate” is that the constitution is a rag-bag of different measures. Whilst some of them are probably non-controversial and even “improvements” versus the current system, others are emphatically not. As a result, there are many different debates going on and as many voters are pre-eminently preoccupied with their own day to day lives and the way the proposed constitution will alter them, their focus will clearly be on those areas of the proposed document.
Where communication and debate have failed to mobilise voters, it is partly because Commissioners and their national government allies have presented the draft constitution in a false or tendentious way which has greatly alarmed and irritated voters, such as was the case with the attempt to portray the document as Europe’s only means of avoiding a new holocaust or new wars between nations. Clearly, that approach has backfired and it is now likely that voters will react and reject the whole rag-bag document in its entirety.
I note that you or your spokespeople have not reacted to my questions (on your “Holocaust” posting) regarding EU funding of anti-semitic hate broadcasts via the Palestinian Authority TV. Is that because you support the sentiments expressed in the TV station’s sermons and other output, or because you consider the matter to be too trivial to respond to?
I understand that you are busy people, and that the Brazilian rainforest beckons, but questions about the EU’s sponsorship of a TV station that promotes the extermination of Jews surely have much relevance to a debate about democratic accountability, especially when you enter debate to claim that the draft document is Europe’s way of avoiding further holocausts. To claim that on the one hand, whilst funding Islamist calls to kill Jews on the other, is at the least inconsistent, and allows voters and taxpayers to question the democratic soundness of the consitutional project. Because many voters will think that to perpetuate a system and institutions which uses their tax money for such ends is a grave error.
That the current EU system ignores concerns of this sort about its policies and measures shows that it is not capable of dealing with those concerns in an accountable way. This suggests that the system and its insitutions need to be rethought and recast, preferably in a democratic way, rather than perpetuated by means of this constitutional document.
It is an insult to French and Dutch voters to imply that, in evaluating the draft document, they are being selfish or shortsighted (even if, in a democracy, it is their perfect right to vote on selfish and shortsighted lines if they want to…). By and large, voters can see through to the essence of what they are being asked to approve. But proponents of the draft document persist in insulting those who raise objections to it. It isn’t smart communications, and it is mightily offensive too. Almost as offensive, in fact, as positing the document as the only barrier between us voters and another holocaust or WWIII!
Posted by Hero von Esens
