Jacob Christensen

Well, if you are Belgian you have to have some sense of humour. So here is the Brussels Jungle – any similarities to actual EU processes and policies are … slightly scary.

Unrelated, but here are some Jacques Brel classics thrown in for good measure:

Listen, it could have been worse. It could have been … Helge Sander.

HT: Kosmopolito.

As if the world didn’t have more serious issues to consider – like, say Congo – LEGO™ bricks are now all the rage in Brussels. Or perhaps not.

But I find the idea of Sweden as an IKEA package (holding JAS Gripen fighters) pretty funny.

Following Søren Pind, the Liberal Party’s failed candidate for mayor of Copenhagen and now foreign policy spokesman and all-round noisemaker, can often be quite entertaining. But let me answer Pind’s latest question – “When did we ever vote on EC competences in immigration policy?” – and provocation – “Let’s just ignore the European Court of Justice!”.

Well, first of all I’ve taught European politics for a number of years and my first and most important piece of information when it comes to the ECJ is:

If there is any room for interpretation, the ECJ will decide in support for further integration under EC regulations.

So the lawyers in the Justice and Immigration Ministries really ought to have known about this, or else legal education in Denmark is a few decades behind the developments.

And the answer to Pind’s question wil be: October 1972.

Turning political questions into legal decisions may not always be a good idea, but the competences of the ECJ and the general line of its decisions are not exactly a secret. Courts are not pro-active so it takes a complaint before issues such as these hit the fan public agenda. And we will no doubt be seeing the government put quite a lot of effort into trying to salvage the Danish regulations during August and September.

This one is complicated, so let me just note that July – which is otherwise the Sommerloch in Danish politics – could turn out to be the beginning of something interesting.

The shortest possible way of describing the issue is that the European Court of Justice (and basically, that means EC legislation – not anything to do with the JHA opt-out) appears to have blown a Titanic-sized hole in the immigration policy led by the government since 2001.

As it is, the story so far raises a number of questions which still have to be answered:

• Was it due to incompetence, administrative or political orders that the Danish Immigration Service Agency provided applicants for family reunions with false information?
• When did ministers (first Rikke Hvilshøj and now Birthe Rønn Hornbech) learn that there was a problem with EC regulations?
• When did the prime minister know and how did he react?

For what it is worth, the political commentator Ralf Pittelkow in a column on Jyllands-Postens homepage basically echoes the Danish People’s Party’s rejection of the ECJ’s role in European integration – and as we all know, Pittelkow is Mr. Karen Jespersen and like her, he has made the transition from radical socialist over social democracy to neo-nationalism. So it looks like the Liberals are positioning themselves in the anti-EC-legislation corner.

The only parties who greet the developments are the Social Liberals and the Socialists while the Social Democrats are more or less stuck in the middle: They are still trying to rebuild their credibility as an anti-immigration party.

Theoretically, the government could try a grand (issue) coalition with the Social Democrats but that would leave a wide open space for the Danish People’s Party to attack both Liberals and Social Democrats. On the other hand, the Social Democrats cannot win electorally by allying themselves with the Socialists and the Social Liberals against the government, while the government would be asking for trouble with other European governments if it tried to formally restrict the role of the ECJ. That would in all likelihood take another round of treaty negotiations.

Give the Immigration minister the chop? A nice short-term soloution, but the problem here is that Anders Fogh Rasmussen has invested too much prestige in her. Still: This is politics and you could sacrifice a minor player in the interests of the larger game.

Oh, well. Danish politics as we knew and loved it up until 2001: Complicated and unpredictable.

Occasionally, technical goofs can be very enlightning.

I decided to take a look at the latest Eurobarometer (autumn 2007) to see how the Irish place themselves with regard to the EU and European institutions. To make a very long story short, the Irish do not appear to be particularly Euro-skeptic, at least not in the British meaning of the term. See for instance this map:

Note the difference between Ireland and the UK!

The Irish also have higher trust for the EU than national political institutions:

However, when asked about political efficacy, the Irish tend to think that their voice is not heard in the EU:

So, the ungrateful Paddys Irish voters did it again: Voted to no a European treaty.

With a turn-out of 53,1%, 46,6% voted yes to the Treaty of Lisbon while 53,4% voted no. (Official data here)

The problem now is a) Why did the Irish vote against the treaty and b) What does this mean for Ireland and the EU?

With regard to question a) the immediate answer is likely to be that the voters voted on something else than the issue – political scientists have a term for this: the second-order election problem -, but there is a couple of problems here:

a1) This isn’t the first time the Irish have stopped (at least momentarily) an EU treaty. It happened in 2001 and even if the turn-out was a pathetic 34,8%, the politicians should have learnt their lesson by now.

a2) This isn’t the first time, the present treaty has hit a serious bump in the road: I’ll leave aside the legal niceties and note that the French rejected the treaty in its original form in 2005 (Y: 45,3%, N: 54,7, T-O: 69,3%) as did the Dutch a couple of days later (Y: 38,5%, N: 61,5%, T-O: 63,3%). This treaty systematically fails at referendums.

It will be interesting to see a breakdown of the numbers, but generally there seems to be some clear dimensions in the voting in all three countries: Class and urban-rural divisions play a role here¹ – the urban middle-classes are pro-Europe, the working-class and people from rural areas are more likely to be Euro-sceptic.²

b) is trickier and political scientists in general are bad oracles but I’ll try some observations:

b1) The obvious strategy will be to make this “the Irish problem” in order to contain the damage in the short run. I’m not sure that this is the best road to take in the long run as there are misgivings about the EU out there.

b2) Ireland and to a certain degree Denmark has provisions for mandatory referendums, while there is a strong push for a UK referendum on Europe by anti-EU groups. This could stop formal institutional development and push the cooperation into transnational policy-networks that are more flexible but also more difficult to control.

b3) Denmark has a couple of issues on the agenda – the Maastricht opt-outs and the future of Anders Fogh Rasmussen. I’m sure that it would be possible to hold referendums on the opt-outs under the present Nice Treaty but it may look odd politically. On the other hand, it might theoretically be easier to keep the referendums as referendums on Justice and Home Affairs and Foreign and Defence Policy. My guess is that we will be a bit wiser in early July or August.

Declaration of interest: In case anybody out there wonder, I’ve voted in the Danish referendums in 1986, 1992, 1993 and 1998 as well as the Swedish referendum in 2003. I voted yes all of the times even if I had and have some reservations about the economic conception behind the ECB’s brief.

Update: Professor Richard Sinnott, author of a standard volume on Irish electoral behaviour, has this analysis in the Irish Times. He points to two factors affecting the vote: a) a lack of confidence in people regarding their knowledge of the issues and b) national identity.

How would this

… it is evident that running an integrationist referendum in a political culture in which almost two-thirds of the electorate feel themselves to belong exclusively to a certain national identity (in this case Irish) is never going to be a walkover.

apply in the Danish case?

1. One of my correspondents pointed to the fishing industry as a particular problem [↩]
2. the term is not used in the British sense where Euro-skeptic is a euphemism for anti-European [↩]

If these early results stand, boy what a mess the EU has on its hands. If they don’t, well, that will teach us something about the regional distribution of votes in Ireland.

“Níl” is Gaelic for “No”

Henry Farrell has been busy and provides us with two posts about the Irish referendum on Thursday. The Crooked Timber piece is more or less a summary of the campaign (which in many ways appears to have been pretty unfocused on both sides) while the Monkey Cage post discusses Andrew Moravcik’s understanding of the need (or lack thereof) for legitimising the EU. (HF is sceptical of AM, in case you are curious).

I’ll just steal this from the Monkey Cage post and ask if this would also apply to Denmark (remember that if the Lisbon Treaty passes the Irish referendum, then we are looking at one or more referendums in Denmark in the near future) and Sweden:

Given the difficulties encountered by both the pro-EU argument for legitimation through more democracy, and Moravcsik’s more limited functionalist approach, is there any alternative? My first approximation argument is that there is. As Moravcsik says, there are relatively few salient fundamental cleavages in politics, and European integration isn’t one of them. Thus, the inherent disorganization of the debate in referendums, where you get one side composed of European elites convinced that Europe is a matter of obligation and destiny, the other side a discordant clatter of contrary viewpoints, and voters not quite sure what to do with either set of claims.

The alternative is to recast European policies in the light of traditional cleavages, the most obvious one being the cleavage between left and right. Europe has, to date, been the matter of consensus between center left and center right. But there are very different ways in which politics might be organized on the European level, depending on your attachment to the traditional models of left and right. The left has traditionally favoured a variety of national institutions designed to protect individuals against the vagaries of markets, the right (with some variations) has been more attached in recent decades to free market policies. European policies have clear implications for the feasibility of both, depending on which specific policies are chosen.