After Gothenburg - repression

jean-christophe helary helary at niji.or.jp
Tue Jun 19 10:06:00 PDT 2001



> I actually saw little admirable in the Irish vote against Nice. There may
> be problems with Nice that good lefties could articulate, but the campaign
> in Ireland looked based more on parochialism and privileged self-interest,
> not any kind of democratic principle.
>
> -- Nathan Newman

i remember when we had to vote by referendum on the maastricht treaty. the campaign was crap and any serious person who really wanted to know what the thing was about had to read a few hundred pages in small print. not even to mention that the whole stuff was written in 'legalese' french which does not help reading. the funny thing is that no party had interest in explaining precisely why the treaty was good or bad. pro people did not want to show the tricky parts, cons did not want to show the good parts, and we were left for endless hours with politicians saying 'vote yes' 'no, vote no' 'no, vote yes' ... democracy is education, but how do you educate people in 1 year about international law and all the necessary stuff to understand what the eu is about ???

nice refusal in ireland is an opportunity for 'good' leftists (as opposed to 'bad' (???) leftists ?) to articulate what a good treaty could be. it's time they realize they are needed.

jc helary



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