I must admit ambiguous feelings about the upcoming French referendum on the European Constitution, rather like the old joke about your mother in law driving off a cliff in your brand new sports car. On the one hand, it will be a deep and perhaps fatally embarrassing blow to the career of Jacques Chirac, and what's not to like about that?
Says the British Independent:
President Chirac, 71, has said that he has no plans to resign, but rejection of the constitution - originally his idea - would reduce him to the lamest of ducks for the last two years of his term and finally signal the end of his 38-year political career.
A "no" vote would mean that a majority of French voters had repudiated the leaders of all mainstream parties of the centre-rightand centre-left, and the mainstream print media. The basis of French politics and diplomacy for the past 50 years would have been overturned.
On the other hand, looks who's about to vote no:
The latest polls show that no fewer than 58 per cent of Socialist voters and 70 per cent of Greens will vote "non" tomorrow, against official party policy. Centre-left voters have been persuaded, during a rumbustious and muddling campaign, that the constitution would take the EU into anti-social, "ultra-liberal", hard-capitalist territory, destroying French public services and shipping French jobs to the new member states in eastern Europe. This argument has largely been based on language - "free and fair competition ... free movement of people, goods and services" - which has been in every European treaty since 1957.
Can anything that 70% of the Greens oppose really be bad? But the real reason the French are voting against the EU Constitution is that it threatens the greatest dream of the working class: not to have to work so much. From the UK Telegraph:
[The French] are convinced that it will bring in British and American working practices, longer working hours, free markets, cheap burgers and inferior bras. The French are worried that they will not be able to compete.
Carole Myard, a beautician, explains: "Life is not worth living if you only get two weeks' holiday a year." Serge Saugues, a mechanic, agrees. "The Americans and British work like dogs. We need our evenings and our holidays to drink wine, see our women, watch the world."
There you have it. The French conceived the European project because they thought it would help isolate France from competition with the United States, the developing world, and most of the principles of modern physics. Instead it threatens to reduce their ability to legislate against reality. Maybe this will be a good thing, as William Kristol argues in the Weekly Standard, as it will force the Europeans to answer the hard questions about their future. I wouldn't bet my beret on that one.
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