For the last three weeks, protesters in Iceland
have
demonstrated against the government’s decision to retract
Iceland’s application for membership in the European Union. The
government promised in elections last year to hold a referendum on
the membership application. 21 percent of eligible voters in
Iceland have signed a petition demanding the government keep its
promise.
But the protests aren’t necessarily pro-European. A recent
Gallup poll in Iceland shows that while more than 70 percent of
Icelanders want to hold a vote on E.U. membership, only 37 percent
say they want to join the E.U., a dismal number that’s nevertheless
an improvement over the 27 percent that said they wanted to join
the E.U. in 2010. Half a year before that poll, the Icelandic
government voted to apply to the E.U. without a referendum, despite
an earlier promise by the finance minister that no decision would
be made without a vote by the people. Iceland’s
experience with letting banks fail and the antagonism toward
that path displayed by several E.U. member states contributed to
the broad lack of interest in joining the club.
Elections aren’t something the E.U. is especially good at. In
the mid-2000s, an effort to pass a European constitution bypassed
popular voting in 14 member states. Of the four countries that
voted on the Constitution, only voters in Spain supported ratifying
the constitutional treaty by a supermajority (76 percent). Voters
in Luxembourg approved it by a thirteen percent margin, while
voters in France and the Netherlands voted against the
constitutional treaty, effectively killing it. Nevertheless, the
E.U. got most of what it wanted in the Lisbon Treaty, set up as a
series of amendments of previous treaties in order to bypass the
need for popular votes. Some realpoliticking Eurocrats in Brussels
may be looking at the
rushed vote in Crimea and wondering if there are any lessons
for their inner tyrants to draw.
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