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Ireland's Constitutional Amendability and Europe's Constitutional Ambition: the Lisbon Referendum in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

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For some of those who support the Lisbon Treaty, it is difficult to accept that a 53% majority of the 53% voting electorate of a country of a population of 4.4 million should, by voting to reject ratification of the Treaty, single-handedly bring to a halt a process which involves 27 countries with a combined population of almost 500 million. Their point is that there are undemocratic consequences for the whole of Europe if the Lisbon Treaty does not enter into force as a result of the referendum defeat in Ireland, and therefore they argue that there are democratic reasons for objecting to the agreed legal consequences of the result of the Irish referendum. This only holds if we manage to forget, for a moment, that the decision to make the implementation of the Treaty conditional on the unanimous support of all Member States was never something that was at the whim of the Irish electorate, and if we manage to endorse, for a moment, the argument that respecting the effect that an individual Member State's national constitutional and democratic procedures have on the other Member States is only important if lots of people live there. Furthermore, the credibility of the argument depends, in significant part, on the credibility of its three (dubious) assumptions: that Europe has one unified ‘demos’; that democracy means majoritarianism by reference to that single demos; and that, even though the peoples of the other 26 Member States were not consulted prior to the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in their countries, they were accurately represented by their governments who approved ratification. It is noteworthy, however, that there should be an objection to the agreed legal consequences of the Lisbon Treaty rejection which claims for itself the democratic high-ground.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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