On the last Saturday in May the French voted down the proposed European Union constitution. Since the constitution had to be adopted unanimously in order to come into effect, this vote should have killed it altogether. A vote on 1 June in the Netherlands also voted it down. It was generally expected that a planned, and now probably abandoned, vote in Britain would have had similar consequences. Some observers considered it fortunate that the French, whose government had been the constitution's strongest supporter, were the ones to strike it down. The rejection was expected to preclude admission of prospective members such as Ukraine and Turkey. The prospect of Turkey joining the Union was apparently a factor in the French rejection. France's "no" vote also stops the creation of a European Union foreign office and will probably kill the Franco-German plan to form a European Union army.
Prior to the votes, nine European governments had ratified the document, although without referendums. They were doing what had become common with governments taking major steps towards integration-surrendering sovereignty-without consulting their citizens. One might see such practices as a show of contempt for democracy, a typical European expression of the idea that government should be left to an elite. The constitution itself might be seen as an expression of this idea: it is a lawyers' document, 474 pages long, filled with clauses about the "competence" of the European Union (i.e., about the Union's jurisdiction supplanting national jurisdiction). Sovereignty is an abstract idea, too, but it might be interpreted as the rights of the people of an individual country as expressed through their elected government. The further the power from any election, the less any people within Europe might feel a connection with the Union. That is entirely apart from the drastic differences in culture, not to mention political culture, between the Union members. It is ludicrous to talk of the deep democratic traditions of countries like Romania, which have only recently emerged from Communist dictatorship. They may well evolve into very successful democracies, but that process is only now beginning. Yet countries with genuinely long traditions, like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, must be treated the same way within a unified Europe. If most members of the Union are only recent converts to democracy, what sort of Union will result?
Interpretations of the defeat of the new constitution varied wildly, but it will probably have considerable significance. For its supporters, the constitution was a major step in the preordained development of the European Union from a free-trade area toward a European super state. French President Jacques Chirac had very strongly supported the constitution as a means of dealing with the American "hyperpower." In a bizarre twist, the European Commission (in effect, the executive arm of the Union) maintained that the ratification process should continue, despite the French vote, as though agreement by some governments would allow parts of the defunct constitution to take effect. A skeptic would suggest that they are terrified that popular will throughout Europe will sweep them away.
Although the argument is often framed in terms of opposition to the United States, it may be worth remembering that the United States was initially a driving force for European integration, to the point of applying considerable pressure to the very reluctant British to surrender national sovereignty to a larger United States of Europe. The U.S. motive at that time, the era of the Cold War, was to build up a Europe strong enough to face down the Soviets without requiring unlimited U.S. support. Once France became a dominant member of the Union, once French politics demanded frequent attacks against the United States, the idea presumably looked far less attractive.
What happens next depends in large part on why the constitution was voted down. The last European Union referendum in France was the vote favoring the single currency, which barely passed despite promises that the new currency would bring prosperity and economic stability. The reality was higher prices and economic stagnation-which was actually a consequence of French internal policies more than of the Euro. Even so, many Frenchmen thought they had been cheated. The agreement to accept a single currency was linked with a pledge to hold deficits to less than 3% of gross national income. For the United States, with an income of about $12 trillion, this would equate to a deficit of about $ 360 billion (the U.S. figure is actually about $500 billion). The purpose of the limit was to hold down inflation, to keep the Euro hard, and almost certainly to convince Germans to exchange their hard Deutschemarks for Euros.
Governments facing high unemployment, however, often try to spend their way out of trouble. Without such spending, the economy-which means the citizens-may suffer severely. Thus having a hard currency may not generate much enthusiasm. In the French case, the combination of an anti-deficit policy and stagnation limits the government's ability to spend on anything. That is why the current French naval program to build general-purpose frigates and a ship-launched land-attack missile is in considerable trouble. There is no money for the program. A creative solution, to obtain a large bank loan and thus evade the 3% ceiling, failed when the Italians, who were partnering the French, refused to adopt the idea.
People do not vote up or down on a referendum for abstract reasons. The French are angry because their economy is in trouble and too many are feeling the results. French law guarantees job security, benefits, and early retirement, which increases the load on government funds. The French worker does not relate that security to the fact that France has more than 10% unemployment, or that those below the age of 25 have an even higher rate. To Americans, who generally work longer hours with much less job security, France seems to have solved the social problem, ignoring that this holds true only for those who are employed. French stagnation and joblessness are actually far worse than they are here. What is not appreciated is that genuine job security means that employers cannot freely create jobs for fear that they cannot reduce employment if they get into trouble. What seems to be good social policy turns out to be a recipe for unemployment. We have not yet invented an ideal economy. Capitalism seems to produce remarkable prosperity, but at a high social cost; the French and German attempts to evade the cost are not working.
No French politician wants to run on these unpleasant truths. The practice has therefore been to blame the unelected European Union bureaucrats for the problem.
This is the first time that the European "project" has really encountered problems. The politically correct view in much of Europe has been that deeper integration is not merely desirable but inevitable. Many Europeans are unenthusiastic about the Union; some regard it and Brussels as a machine for extracting their money for ever more corrupt purposes. The massive European Union agricultural subsidies, for example, are an open scandal, with many payments made for nonexistent products. Travelers to Europe are familiar with the value-added (sales) tax, which funds the Union and is effectively unaccountable. To a considerable extent the idea of the subsidies was to spread the wealth of Europe, so that the poorer countries benefited enormously from membership. There was not enough money, however, to help the new members from Central Europe, so the enlarged Union has two rather different tiers. The governments of Central Europe have accepted the constitution anyway, because the advantages of any kind of membership are so enormous, but that does not mean that they particularly want to surrender their rights. They were told to cooperate or be rejected, which is a recipe for later trouble.
Many writers are saying that the referendum was a mistake, or that it can easily be reversed. Several of the European countries, however, such as Germany, are in at least as much trouble economically as France. In Germany, the current government may well be turned out of power this fall as the populace demands some solutions (ironically, the winners would be conservatives pledged to begin to dismantle the social-security state, which is just what the voters fear most). It is unlikely that a change of government will solve the German problem. Nor will enlarging the Union, which will free ever more workers to compete within Europe for a limited number of jobs-or will free firms in high-cost countries like Germany to move production elsewhere within Europe.
These considerations suggest that the French vote was the beginning of a much larger convulsion. The ultimate beneficiaries may well be radical-right parties pledging to break with politics as usual and thus to end the corrupt party now continuing in Brussels. High unemployment in France and Germany might well cause such politicians to advocate expelling the large number of "foreigners" (often native-born, but still distinctive because of their Arab backgrounds) living in Europe, and also to cut off access to refugees of any stripe. Such rumblings can currently be seen, but they are still at the margins.
This is a familiar, but very unhappy, picture. The sheer number of young unemployed workers in France and Germany, and to a lesser extent in other European countries, should be a matter of concern, because in the past it has been just these groups which have formed revolutionary mobs and armies (and criminal gangs). Many of the unemployed are young Muslims who feel marginalized, at least in France, and who see jihadist politics as a way of fighting back. Their fury is a real factor in the current war against terrorism.
These somewhat abstract considerations may be reflected in the future of European defense. If the real problem is mass unemployment, then governments are likely to demand the freedom to create jobs, which will mean to break the 3% barrier (France and Germany have already done so, and Greece apparently did so to fund the Olympics). The pact which enforces it will probably be renegotiated; the Euro itself may be abandoned. How much, if any, of the resulting spending will go to the military? How do European governments balance external threats against the real internal threat generated by mass unemployment? How will the French and the Germans deal with a potential jihads threat? Do they expel unemployed Muslims or do they seek to integrate them into society and perhaps create jobs for more of them?
In the past, some types of military spending have been supported because they apparently kept valuable high-technology industries alive. That would seem to explain the survival of the Eurofighter program, whose product can be described as a Cold War short-range interceptor largely irrelevant to the current expeditionary environment. If money is tight, such assumptions may be reconsidered. For example, European governments may conclude that industries like military aircraft production and shipbuilding represent a large cost but only a very small fraction of the high-technology future, that they should concentrate their limited funds on higher-value items such as software. If they do not see any immediate threat demanding large fleets and large air forces, they may decide to cut force levels even more drastically than in the recent past. The main maritime demands may be for small expeditionary strike forces built around a few carriers, coupled with relatively large coast guards (i.e., forces of low-technology ships) whose main role will be to prevent mass migration across the Mediterranean.
In the larger sense, is the French vote the beginning of disintegration for the European Union? Is it the beginning of a larger and more fundamental attack on European elites (which currently govern the continent) and, beyond that, on current European democracy? Do the European politicians decide that it is a call not for disintegration but for serious reform? Or do they declare (as the European Commissioners have) that the governments, which have already approved the constitution, which (in theory) represent 49% of the European population, outweigh the first referendum on the Union?