Irish Nice vote

[Andrew Flood]

>And the vote by the Irish can be read as a country that has benefitted
>mightily by participation in the European Union and now fears sharing the
>benefits - particularly fearing having to itself contribute aid - to the
>poorer nations asking for entry to the EU.
>
>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

Hi Nathan and others,

while this is the spin that the European establishment
are putting on the vote it is not very accurate.  Almost
all (if not all) of the various No campaigns said they
were in favour of enlargement (and indeed as the EU has
now admitted that voting No would make no difference
to this process, at least in the short term).  The
No campaigns themselves were sharply divided beyond this
from 'pro-life' to revolutionary left and anarchist. Across
this spectrum the main issues were
- neutrality
- anti-capitalist globalisations
- loss of 'power'
- on the part of the pro-life crowd a fear that EU would
introduce abortion.

I was part of the anarchist campaign which has a web
page at http://struggle.ws/about/nice.html where
you can see the posters and leaflets we used, documents
on some of the key issues and a critiue of one of the
right wing no campaigns.

Andrew

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