(The author of a new EU Phrasebook, launched in Brussels today, analyses European leaders’ utter inability to understand the word ‘No’.)
Four times, European voters have said ‘No’ to European Union documents: in Ireland on 7 June 2001 (Nice Treaty); in France and Holland on 29 May and 1 June 2005 (European Constitution); and most recently in Ireland on 12 June 2008 (Lisbon Treaty). And all four times, European leaders responded by effectively saying: ‘No doesn’t really mean no.’
For most people, a vote is a question asked, and an answer received. Yet European and national politicians treated the ‘No’ votes not as answers, but as obstacles to be negotiated around. They deployed a variety of creative phrasing and reasoning to indicate why these votes did not really count, and how they could be avoided.
Read on at Spiked,
http://www.spiked-online.com/i...