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Originally Posted by simon
The referendum is going to give the French elite a mechanism to get the French public to do their dirty work for them and say 'Non!' to any further expansion.
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It's kind of a deal that politicians had to make with the population.
It is now clear that the EU constitution (unchanged) will be submitted to a new vote in France after the next presidential and parliamentary elections (2007), this time though, it will be submitted to the parliament to ensure its adoption, not to the population. There isn't even a need to find a justification for the change of method, in France it's the president alone who decide if a vote will go through the parliament or a referendum, and each president takes different decision, so the justification will simply be that the new president has taken a different decision from the previous one. And the fact that both the president and the parliament will have been freshly elected will allow them to say that they obviously have the legitimacy to adopt the EU constitution in the name of the people since they've just won the elections!
However, in exchange for this future parliamentary adoption of the EU constitution, politicians had to give something to the population, some kind of control over what worries people a lot: the expansion of the EU. And this is where the new law of having referendums for each new member get into play. With that law, politicians will be able to say to the population: "Yes, the parliament is adopting the EU constitution, which is good for the country, but the people will now have control over the expansion of the EU and will be able to veto any new member they don't approve of".
That's the deal.
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Originally Posted by simon
Unfortunately for the French elite, the constitution referendum shows that the French public doesn't want either a wider or a deeper union.
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It's a bit more complicated than that, the left wing of the socialist party, the communist party, and various extreme left parties that caused the 'no' to win the referendum are not anti-EU, and they are certainly not anti-federalist, quite the contrary, what they are is anti-capitalistic.
They rejected the EU constitution because they think it is too liberal, too close of the ultra capitalistic US model, those people indeed want a deeper EU, they support the idea of a highly centralized EU, they want an EU president directly elected by the people, they want a central government, they want centralized public administrations. For example they are opposed to the privatization of electricity companies and to have an open EU market where all electricity companies from all EU members can compete, they see that as the US ultra capitalistic way of doing things and they don't want that for Europe. What they want is to create at the EU level what was done at the national level of many European countries, they want the nationalization of all electricity companies in the EU and their merging in a huge EU public company which would have a monopoly within the EU, same thing for railroads or the post office, they want an EU railroad company and an EU post office.
Basically, they want to keep the same level of quality in social and public services that most European countries currently have, and they don't want those national public services to compete with each other in a big capitalistic EU market, they want those national public services to merge in order to create EU public services.
They want a social Europe, not a capitalistic jungle like in the US or China for that matter.
So even though those people on the left have voted no to the EU constitution, it's only because they see it as capitalistic, they want a socialist constitution, they are indeed in favor of a much more deeply integrated EU with highly centralized administrations. And this is why they are also opposed to a further expansion of the EU, because they consider that the priority is to strengthen the EU with its current members, they see the expansion as a way for big private companies to expand their market and to exploit workers in the poorest new members by paying them 10 times less than what they pay in older members (but still selling their products at the same price which means huge profits for a few and poverty for millions), putting workers in older members out of jobs or blackmailing them into accepting lower salaries.