There has been much sniggering in the Western media over Tuesday’s referendum in Iraq on re-electing Saddam Hussein, since it is obvious that the only permissible answer was Yes. But how different are referendums in the European Union? On Saturday the Irish will be voting for the second time on the Nice Treaty, because when they voted on it in June 2001 they got the answer ‘wrong’ and voted No. If the vote is now Yes, the televised jubilation across the Continent will be as synthetic as it was in Baghdad.
Doctors in the Netherlands say that committing euthanasia becomes easier after you have done it once. The same is evidently true of overruling democracy. In 1992, when Denmark voted against the Maastricht Treaty, Danish democracy was gang-raped when the other 11 EU states demanded that Denmark ignore the result and re-run the vote. In neither the Danish nor the Irish case was there any suggestion whatever that the first vote had been technically flawed; in both cases, the second vote was on the same text as the first.
Referendums are the purest form of democracy: in Ireland, unlike in Britain, they are actually part of the legislative process.
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