An American perspective on the French Non
The French voted overwhelmingly yesterday to reject the EU constitution, and I’ve spent the morning pondering this strange event from my perspective as an American. I feel strangely saddened by the rejection, for I worry that an important opportunity, for Europe and the world, may be missed. One can conceive of the putative EU constitution as a compromise- some would say a bastard child- of two ideologies. The businessmen are obsessed with free trade, and with opening up continental Europe to the type of privatization that has already occurred to a lesser extent in places like the United Kingdom. Those in civil society, in contrast, want to create a unified and peaceful Europe with a democratic governance system. Truth be told, I can understand why some progressives were upset with the current draft of the constitution: the free-traders managed to slip in some provisions that have no business being in a constitution, but would best be decided by the EU Parliament.
Maybe, as an American, I should just shrug it off as part of the inherent and healthy unpredictability of a democracy: the people have spoken, yadda yadda. And it is possible that a better, less neo-liberal (in the economic sense) constitution will be resurrected from the ashes of this one. Still, I worry that the French rejection is symptomatic of a universal human tendency toward protecting one’s “own” people and culture first, a tendency that is becoming much more problematic in the 21st century. Many of the world’s major problems, whether environmental, economic, or social, are global in scale. Power too, both economic and political (in the broad sense of that word) has become global in scale, although there are still few hands holding the reins of power. However, the majority of people remain deeply suspicious about any attempt to make the global governance system more democratic. And for good reason, I might add, as there are plenty of cases where a country embarks on “democratic” reforms that are anything but democratic in effect.
The main response of progressives to this globalization of power has been to advocate localism, the devolution of power downward. While this is an appealing ideal, it’s usually not a useful response. French voters can reject as many drafts of the EU constitution as they want, but the economy of Europe will continue to integrate- there just won’t be any citizen oversight of the process. I want to suggest to all progressives a simple test, to make sure our ideologies aren’t getting ahead of the real political event of the world: if your political enemies are celebrating a decision you made, then that decision is probably a bad one. And to all the left in France who strongly critique the United States (for good reason, on some occasions), and who spearheaded the “Non” vote, I hope you realize that they were pulling out the champagne in the White House last night.
