BUT IF THEY'LL SAY "NO" WHEN YOU ASK THEM...:

Who cares about Europe?: Voters don’t know much about the European Union. What’s more, they don’t want to learn (Charlemagne, Sep 18th 2008, The Economist)

As Ireland is pressed to hold a new referendum on Lisbon (and to get the answer right this time), the government there has talked about the need to explain the treaty and the EU better. Yet that is undermined by the most significant finding of all in the Irish research: most voters have a limited appetite for information about the EU. A “vast majority” of focus group members—whether they backed Lisbon or not—had no idea how decisions are taken in the union. “Few” thought that, realistically, they would bother to learn more.

This is the key message of the Irish vote. The public does not want to understand the fiendish complexity of the EU. Many in the EU establishment draw a simple conclusion from that: never ask voters directly about something as complicated as a treaty.

They know that many other governments would have lost referendums if they had dared to hold them (instead, the 26 other countries all chose the safer path of ratifying the treaty through national parliaments). The EU establishment takes comfort in the fact that—like Irish “yes” voters—a broad majority of EU citizens have a fuzzy sense that the project is a good thing, even if they have little idea how it works. To many Eurocrats, voter indifference is something to be managed, rather than feared. National health policies are as complex as EU treaties, argues a diplomat, and voters do not expect to understand every detail of how health systems work. This is a tempting argument. But in the longer term, EU leaders are dodging a fundamental question: do you need to seek voters’ informed consent for the European project?

The answer must surely be yes.

...then the true believers will find a way not to ask. They believe in transnationalism, not consensual government.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 18, 2008 7:01 PM