website title

Update Materials

Update 5 (July 2005):

Taking no for an answer: the causes and consequences of the French and Dutch rejection of the EU's Constitutional Treaty.

Enshrined in some 66,000 words, the proposed EU constitutional treaty was an intergovernmental compromise designed to serve a variety of purposes. As a result it could be read in many ways. To proponents, one of its main contributions would be to modernise the decision-making structure of the EU (see chapter 2) in order to help it cope with the 2004 enlargement to 25 member states. To opponents, these changes, by removing the national veto in some areas, represented a threat to the sovereignty of member states - especially the smaller member states. To proponents, the treaty struck a balance between the social provision and the freeing up of trade that the EU has striven for ever since its inception. To opponents, however, it was either an attempt to shore up outdated protectionism and interventionism or, by contrast, a ploy to foist on Europeans an alien, Anglo-Saxon, neo-liberalism (see chapter 9). To proponents, the treaty and the process that created it was to be the means by which the EU reconnected with ordinary citizens. To opponents, the unelected nature of the constitutional convention that drafted the treaty and the secretive intergovernmental negotiations that finalised it provided yet another illustration of the EU's chronic 'democratic deficit' - something made even worse by the decision of most member states to make ratification of the treaty purely a matter for parliament rather than consulting their people more directly.

Most, however, does not mean all. Ten member states (the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the UK) either decided or were obliged to hold binding or advisory referendums on the treaty. The first such vote went ahead in February 2005 in Spain - since its entry in 1986 a clear beneficiary of both the EU's regional spending and its much-trumpeted capacity to bolster democracy in states that have emerged from dictatorship. As expected, and on the back of the recent election of a still popular centre- left government, the Spanish yes campaign won an easy 77-17 victory. The level of turnout (42%) and number of spoiled ballots (6%) disappointed many 'Europhiles', and a hint of uneasiness about the votes to come in other countries began to be faintly detectable. This discrete disquiet did not, however, stop parliaments in ten member states (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia) ratifying the treaty by thumping majorities, and in any case anxieties at that point focused mainly on the traditionally 'eurosceptic' UK.

By the time that some 70% of France's 42 million voters went to the polls in their binding referendum on 29 May 2005, however, it was clear to most observers that most of them were going to say non, as indeed they did by an unexpectedly wide margin of 55-45. As more detailed analysis of the French campaign and results confirms, there seems to have been no one reason why. Explanations for rejecting the treaty included the following: a protest vote against a massively unpopular government and president, particularly on the part of those on the centre-left who had been virtually forced to vote for him in 2002; acute (or perhaps chronic) dissatisfaction with an economy that although highly successful in terms of exports and productivity seems incapable of generating sufficient employment, particularly for the young; a fear that a document peppered with phrases about competition and the market might be the harbinger of a neo-liberal regime that will undermine the relatively generous welfare social protection enjoyed by French citizens at a time when the sacred service publique is already threatened by the so-called 'Bolkestein directive' aimed at freeing up trade in services and jobs are either going abroad or to immigrants from the new EU countries - symbolised in the campaign by cheap Chinese clothes and Polish plumbers; a monumental split in the Socialist Party which occurred in spite the fact that the party had held an internal referendum on the topic and agreed to support the treaty and which saw a majority of the party's supporters vote no; a highly effective media and grassroots campaign by the anti-globalisation movement that influenced far more than just its own supporters - not least disillusioned Socialists; a typically xenophobic and nationalist campaign by the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, which (however misleadingly) linked ratification directly to Turkish accession; and finally something of a retrospective protest against the accession of the ten new member states in 2004 - a move that is understood (correctly perhaps) not only as likely to undercut the French economy (Polish plumbers again!) but also to undermine France's traditional leadership of the EU.

Beneath this multiplicity of motives lay some broad geographic, socio-economic, and demographic patterns. The no vote was highest in France's most economically depressed regions and the yes campaign achieved easy wins in the most prosperous cities, notably Paris. The yes campaign also did much better among affluent, educated people working in secure occupations, while those without so much education and with low-paid or no jobs tended to vote no. The younger you were the more likely you were to vote no, too. Obviously, this may well have had a lot to do with youth unemployment. But it also suggests that, if the young in France (and elsewhere in Europe) are still idealistic, they are less inspired than the post-war generation by the European ideal and more attracted to the message of the anti-globalisation movement, whose methods - a mixture of direct action and savvy use of new technology (see chapter 7) - left France's political establishment floundering. That it did so is hardly surprising: to an extent almost unique in Europe, the French political landscape is still populated by politicians who might well have been declared dinosaurs in many other countries; it is hard not to see in the no vote something of a generational protest against septuagenarian politicians like President Chirac and the chief architect of the constitution Valérie Giscard d'Estaing


Very probably, the French result impacted on the vote held just a few days later on 1 June 2005 in the Netherlands, a country which normally eschews referendums. Certainly, Dutch voters thinking of saying nee could no longer be put off by the thought that in so doing they might condemn their country to isolation and embarrassment. Nevertheless, any domino effect cannot explain the nee campaign's massive 62-38 margin of victory on a turnout of 63% - way in excess of the 30% that the Dutch government declared beforehand that it would regard as binding.

Again, a number of reasons seemed to have combined to defeat the treaty. A list would include the following: a protest vote against a very unpopular coalition government that is attempting to push through welfare reform when unemployment is rising and the economy is stagnant; the initial reluctance of that government to actively campaign for a yes vote until very late on, at which point its alarmist tactics (and decision to dip further into public funds) backfired badly (although it must be said that - as in France - most of those identifying themselves as supporters of the two biggest governing parties voted overwhelmingly for the treaty); a very rational fear that the proposed new voting arrangements, widely believed to favour bigger countries, might make it more difficult for a country of only 16 million people to protect and promote its interests; an equally rational resentment at paying more per head than any other member state into the EU budget at the same time as other countries either seemed to be doing better out of it or at least getting away with breaking its rules (for instance on the Stability and Growth Pact) in a way that the Netherlands (which many believe has suffered from unwarranted inflation since adopting the euro) would never contemplate; the diffuse sense that deepening EU integration might at some point in the future, even if not now, allow other countries to interfere with what the Dutch value about their way of life, be it the tolerance reflected in the decriminalisation of prostitution and drugs or the solid, Christian bourgeois values of its more conservative inhabitants; the ability of populist politicians - and especially the ex-liberal MP Geert Wilders, widely touted as the next Pim Fortuyn - to make the link (however erroneous) between ratification of the treaty and the putative end of national controls on immigration and asylum at a time when both are particularly hot topics (see chapter 10).

More broadly, both results seem to confirm a disconnect between citizens and not just the EU but also their own national politicians, especially those on the mainstream left and right whose official agreement that the treaty was a good thing simply reinforced the suspicion - fuelled by more radical and maverick politicians - that 'the elites' were trying to hoodwink 'the people'. Less than 10% of all French parliamentarians were against the constitutional treaty, as opposed to 55% of their compatriots. In the Netherlands the figures were around 15% and 62% respectively - again quite a credibility gap. Clearly, populism, in the sense of people believing that their politicians are at best out of touch and at worse involved in some cosy conspiracy to betray the interests and values of the heartland, has enormous potential in contemporary Europe - one reason, in fact, why many commentators disapprove of referendums (supposedly simplistic and prone to become repositories for all sorts of diverse feelings and fears that may have little to do with the actual question on the ballot) as a political tool in the first place (see chapter 6).

Even more broadly, it could be argued that the EU has at one and the same time become a victim of its own success in delivering peace to Europe - a peace which is now taken for granted, especially by the young - and a casualty of the inability of national governments to a) marry that peace with prosperity for all of its citizens (again, especially the young) and/or b) persuade those citizens of the tangible benefits of membership rather than blaming or even bashing 'Brussels' every time they are supposedly obliged into unpopular policies. In short, and put bluntly, both the French and Dutch yes campaigns failed to provide people who were already worried about the way things are going with a good reason why they should vote for something that could be represented as threatening even more uncertainty and loss of control. Instead, they opted for a distinctly second-best option, namely trying to scare people into thinking that no change would lead to some kind of catastrophe - a tactic that not only failed to convince but actively got people's backs up.

All this notwithstanding, only the most hardened Eurosceptic would take from the referendums the message that the populations of these two founding member states were rejecting the EU per se: the overwhelming majority of the no campaigns and voters in both countries made it clear that they objected, as it were, not to the train itself but to where it might be heading and the speed at which it seemed to be heading there. In hindsight, then, the decision not only to use the term constitution (a term that cannot help but imply some kind of 'United States of Europe' or 'Federal Superstate'), but also to include detailed policy goals rather than simply the matters of process that one would have expected to find in such a document, appears to have been a grave political error. On the other hand, if it was a mistake, it was a deliberate one: one does not have to be a hardened Eurosceptic to believe that had the treaty been ratified smoothly, its 'constitutional' status would have used in the future as justification for further moves to what the founding Treaty of Rome called 'ever closer union'.

In the few days after the no votes, Europe's political leaders scrambled to impose their own interpretations of what had happened and what should therefore be done. It soon became clear, however, that in spite of the attempts of some (most obviously the holder of the EU's rotating presidency, Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker) to argue that ratification (and therefore further referendums) should proceed regardless, that at best the process would have to be suspended - possibly, indeed probably, permanently. One might argue that to do is in effect to deny to the Czechs, Danes, Irish, Poles, Portuguese and British the democratic say that was accorded to the Spanish, French and Dutch. Against this, however, pundits and politicians declared there was little point carrying on trying to ratify a treaty that had so obviously failed to achieve the unanimity required for it ever to come into force.

By the time the EU heads of government met as the European Council in Brussels in mid-June, it was evident that the debate would have to move on to which parts of the constitutional treaty could perhaps be enacted by different, less exacting means, with some hope held out (not altogether convincingly) that the EU could still rescue from the wreckage things like the extension of co-decision (giving more power to the European Parliament), the creation of a European external (i.e. diplomatic) service, the sending of the Commission's legislative proposals to national parliaments, the provision for such legislation to be generated following citizens' petitions, and even the reweighting of country's voting strengths in the Council. Any salvage operation, however, was put on hold as French president, Jacques Chirac, apparently seeking to snatch some kind of nationalistic victory from the jaws of defeat, turned the summit into an attempt to use the need to agree on the EU's forthcoming budget to make the UK give up the so-called chèque britannique - the rebate  that compensates Britain for the fact that it pays into EU coffers far more than many other rich member states without deriving commensurate benefits from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

It was widely agreed, however, by commentators (even in France) that Chirac was outplayed by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. During the acrimonious two-day meeting in Brussels Blair declared that compromise on the rebate could only come about as part of a comprehensive reform of EU spending that would see significant cuts in the agricultural spending that continues to swallow 40% of the budget and of which France is by far the biggest single beneficiary. Indeed, Blair was soon turning what had become a two-fold crisis into a crusade to persuade European countries - typified by France and Germany - that they need to turn their commitment to the so-called Lisbon agenda of trade and labour-market liberalization into a reality. Whether this would indeed better fit the EU to respond to the competitive challenge from the USA, China and India, and whether it represents an abandonment rather than a modernisation of the European welfare state (see Chapter 9) is a moot point. But as a political strategy for the UK it has the merit of bringing back onside those new member states who, alarmed by the prospect of failing to agree a budget from which they expect to benefit big-time, seemed to be drifting - uncharacteristically it must be said - into an alliance with what some (á la Donald Rumsfeld) insist on calling 'old Europe' (see Chapter 11).

What Tony Blair, and other European leaders who continue to support further enlargement of the EU, will not be able to do, however, is to brush away the damage that, given the xenophobia they both stirred up, both the French and the Dutch referendums seem likely to do to the chances of those states seeking to join the club in the next decade. While experts still expect Romania and Bulgaria to become EU members in 2007 or maybe 2008, the prospects are looking less good, both for Croatia and other Balkan states - a potential flashpoint on the borders of the EU that many would like to see stabilised via membership - and for countries like the Ukraine and of course Turkey, whose claims (geographically, ethnically and religiously) are to many Europeans dubious and disturbing. Turkish political leaders have asserted there is no connection between the French and Dutch no votes and the country's application to join the EU, although the country's stock market had for some time been pricing in the potential blow to its chances of accession. The dimming of the prospect of further enlargement would be a major setback to those who see the carrots and sticks of EU membership as a way of promoting good governance and prosperity among its immediate neighbours. But it would be a brave man or woman who put money on the French (who have apparently been assured a referendum on new accessions to the EU after Bulgaria and Romania) saying yes next time around.

In the wake of the French and Dutch no votes, then, the EU seems to be facing a genuine catch-22. On the one hand, many of its political leaders are convinced that keeping the options open on enlargement is a sensible foreign and indeed economic policy. On the other, their voters may well be unwilling to be led into 'ever-closer union' unless they have a clear idea of which countries, and therefore what kind of people, are going to join them there. Indeed, they are now demanding a more direct say in who is allowed in. Given the failure of the French and the Dutch to come up with the 'right' answer in the early summer of 2005, it may be tempting for politicians to deny them that say, but it may also be politically impossible.

Back to updates list
Back to home page