According to the latest poll, 35% of voters in the Republic of Ireland intend to vote “Yes” to the Lisbon treaty on 12 June, while 18% intend to vote “No.” 47% say they do not know which way they will vote. A poll conducted in January showed that 24% were in favour of the treaty, 10% against, with 64% undecided. An unscientific poll on the web site of a leading Irish daily newspaper revealed that 88% of those who expressed a view online said they felt under-informed about the content of what they were being asked to vote on.
 
The outcome of the poll may well therefore depend on turnout. “No” voters are generally more motivated than “Yes” ones, and in 2001 this led to the surprise victory of the “No” camp against the Nice treaty. (The Irish were made to vote on the same text again, and a “Yes” vote was duly returned the following year.) In 2001, the opinion polls indicated a very large margin of victory for the “Yes” camp and so it is possible that these latest figures also presage a victory for the “No.” But I am not holding my breath.
 
It is true that the EU has suffered a series of defeats in referendums in this decade. The Danes voted against adopting the euro in 2000; the Irish voted against Nice in 2001; the Swedes voted against the euro in 2003. (A wave of sympathy generated by the murder of the politician who led the “Yes” campaign, Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, who was stabbed to death by a Serb a few days before the vote in a department store in Stockholm, was not enough to overcome Swedish Euroscepticism.) The Dutch and the French voted against the European Constitution in 2005. The Swiss voted to abandon all negotiations towards joining the EU in 2001. To be sure, referenda were held in all the ten states which joined the EU in 2004 but the EU has won only one single referendum in Western Europe in the last ten years, when Spain voted in favour of the EU constitution in 2005.
 
There is also much evidence that those countries which have not held referendums have done so mainly out of fear that their pro-EU governments would lose them. This is certainly the case in Britain and probably the case in Germany. Britain backed out of a referendum on both the euro and the European constitution; in the first case because the government decided not to adopt the single currency (no doubt in part because it knew public opposition was so strong); in the second case, it was let off the hook after the French and Dutch “No” votes in 2005. Like other EU governments, it deceitfully then pretended that the Lisbon treaty was different from the rejected constitution and, on the basis of that deceit, ratified the treaty in Parliament instead.
 
In Germany, there is opinion poll evidence that the European single currency is deeply unpopular. Die Welt reported at the beginning of this month that one German in two continues to think in terms of deutsche Marks, while an informal online poll found that 65% of Germans would like to have their own national currency back again. But there is no chance that German voters will ever get a chance to express their view in the polling booth. The epithet usually used to attack Russia under Vladimir Putin, “managed democracy”, surely applies to most EU states and to Germany in particular, where direct elections and referendums are never held, as a matter of government policy.
 
There is, then, much discontent with the EU in Western Europe – and a good deal in Eastern Europe too. Many Hungarians, for instance, wish that their country had never joined the bloc. Those that remain pro-EU are so mainly because it means that they can leave their own countries more easily, as millions of Poles and others have done since accession. However, I do not expect the Irish to vote “No” on 12 June because the EU juggernaut has shown that it continues to centralise power whatever the outcome of democratic elections. There really is no point voting “No” any more because it makes no difference.
 
Everyone knows how the EU leaders connived to re-introduce the European constitution by the back door after the double rejection of it in 2005. I myself have written on this subject in this column (19 Dec 2007). What fewer people understand, perhaps, is that the EU continued to implement the terms of the constitution, as far as it could, even before the text was re-packaged as the Lisbon treaty. Since the signature of the constitution in 2004, the EU has created the following agencies: the European Space Policy, the European Defence Agency, the borders agency Frontex, and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.
 
These agencies are all intended to implement the new powers the EU would have acquired from the EU constitution and will acquire when the Lisbon treaty is ratified. But they were created before the ratification of either treaty and are, as such, illegal. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, for instance, created last year, is supposed to implement the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (which has not been ratified and which has no legal force). But because the EU constitution had been rejected, the EU had to have recourse to a ruse to create it. It did so by means of an obscure article (Article 308) buried inside the 1993 Maastricht Treaty which which allows “measures” to be taken “in the course of the operation of the common market”. But in all its 54 articles and 22 pages, the Charter of Fundamental Rights does not contain one single reference to the common market. The use of Article 308 to create the Agency was therefore brazen cheating.
 
It is therefore quite wrong for Eurosceptics to place their hopes in a revival of democratic politics, at least for the time being. There have been outbursts of anti-EU feeling before, even several expressed in referenda, but the EU simply ignores them and either forces people to vote again or rams the same measures through a supine parliament. In any case, it does what it likes without recourse to legality or democracy. As a result, and because people in the West are concerned more with their material well-being then with their political rights, the appeal to democracy is largely useless. In Orwell’s 1984, the hero Winston Smith, travels to a dingy London pub because he is convinced that the ordinary people must be against the rule of the Party. “If there is hope, it lies in the proles,” he writes in his diary. He was wrong then – and Eurosceptics are wrong now.