Democracy is something else

Although some time has passed since Ireland’s referendum of June 12, a motivation ought to be identified. Why was the Lisbon Treaty – which envisaged an important EU reform in the realm of democracy and efficiency – defeated by the majority-vote? The referendum is the appropriate tool when it addresses comprehensible and concrete projects. It directly involves the citizens and enables them to express their affirmative or negative opinion. Today, it is applicable almost exclusively at local and regional level, and only rarely can it be employed in a national context. A referendum regarding an international treaty that is complex and extensive, paves the way to demagogy and populism. The referendums held in France and in The Netherlands three years ago, just like the recent referendum in Ireland, have represented significant lessons. In all these cases, extremist political forces acted as the representatives of poorly-informed public opinion whose “no” was the result of propaganda, and not of the truth. These forms of referendum have nothing to do with democracy. Rather, they are the product of ‘democratism’, and of democracy’s deformation based on an honest misunderstanding, or on an ideological distortion. Democracy doesn’t mean that the population is governing, but that governing takes place on behalf of the people, since representative or parliamentary democracy has become the norm of our complex societies. However, this doesn’t exclude participatory democracy, nor does it exclude the cooperation of civil society and of committed citizens in planning and implementing decisions. The opposite of democracy takes place also when through its own decision, the member of a large supranational community – for any reason whatever – not only questions the will of the majority members, in fact, it may go so far as preventing it once and for all. In other words: a national popular referendum on a treaty (or a constitution) regarding the regulations and the future of a supranational community isn’t the appropriate tool to be employed for the creation of a general will. It’s an instrument based on old-dated political concepts and on a historical experience surpassed by the unification movement, which enabled Europeans to successfully respond to world wars and to globalization. The dilemma of the European Union, of which the Irish referendum is an expression, lies in the fact that its development and policies largely depend on these kinds of tools, which had been conceived for the political systems of sovereign national States. Not only are they inadequate, they also have no meaning as relates to the reality of the post-national system, whereby national States are united in a federation and whose sovereignty is practised in a collective manner through common institutions. Tools such as the unanimity declaration or the ratification of jointly-planned projects or treaties by Member State representatives, implemented with different procedures and at different moments, act as foreign bodies. They are a drawback to the formation of public awareness and prevent a rational approach to problems, whose resolution is crucial, in the interest of European citizens.