No means No, except in Europe

EU "democracy"
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Last Thursday the Irish, as the sole EU inhabitants to get the option, voted to reject the Treaty of Lisbon which was to further centralise and restructure the union. Which means that after three years of navelgazing and rapackaging the quest to establish an EU constitution is once again back at square one. Then it was the French and the Dutch who rejected the constitution and who therefore this time didn’t get to vote on it. If you vote the wrong way you’ve clearly shown not to be mature enough to decide on these weighty matters. For the Irish government it was more difficult to ignore the population, as the need for a referendum on constitutional matters is enshrined in law, so they had no choice but to call for a vote and hope for the best.

but once again these hopes were dashed, and this in a country traditionally quite Europe-minded. Once again it leaves the EU project floundering and once again the immediate response of European politicians and media is to blame the voter, not the treaty. Three years ago the rejection of the constitution led to a “process of reflection” from which emerged this treaty, largely the result of copying the constitution into a new document and doing global search and replace, with some relatively minor concession and symbolic changes. As if making the EU flag the mandatory symbol of Europe was why people objected to the contitution. Doing the same again isn’t feasable, but the process has to move forward so instead we get various European bigwigs like French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner threatening the Irish for their impudence while Gordon Brown amongst others has called for ignoring the vote by going ahead with the ratification in other countries and leave the Irish government to sort out things at their end.

Because the people in charge are convinced of the essential rightness of the constitreaty we don’t get any serious attempt to understand why first the French and the Dutch and then the Irish voted against it, but instead we get whisper campaigns to delegitimise the results of these referenda. For the Irish result the talking point being pushed is that it’s quite undemocratic for one million Irish to decide for 250 million other Europeans (one example). I agree with that, but it wasn’t the no-voters who decide the rest of Europe shouldn’t have a vote. The other way to delegitimise the Irish vote, and one much in evidence three years ago as well, is to disparage the motives of the voters. If you look at this Crooked Timber thread for example you see arguments that the Irish voted no because of their ignorance, their fear of foreigners, because the yes campaign wasn’t good enough, that it was just too complex for ordinary people to understand, and so on.

The common thread in all of this is that yet another no vote should not intefere with the orderly transition to the EU the European political elites want, but their voters are at best lukewarm about. It is brought as a matter of survival, as if the very functioning of the EU is under threat if these changes aren’t made, but we’ve seen how true that is in the three years since the rejection of the original constitution. Yet somehow the EU muddled through. It’s no wonder people are skeptical when all these grand plans are made without their input, their vote is only taken seriously if they vote yes and when they do vote against them their leaders don’t listen and they’re portrayed as xenophobic ignorami.

That’s what I’m talking about

Football
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Dirk Kuyt celebrates his goal

Four-one against France. After the three-nil victory over Italy with which Oranje started the tournament, the big worry was that this was a fluke, a one-off. With this game Oranje proved it wasn’t, that they won against Italy not because Italy was so bad (though they were) but because the team was so good. Against France they had to struggle harder to win, but they still won. So Oranje is now through to the quarter finals and the country is very very happy indeed for a team nobody had much trust in before the tournament started.

Outer space linkage

science fiction, Your Happening World
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Some quick links to interesting stuff today that don’t need their own post. First up, the annual Strange Horizons fund drive. Strange Horizons is an excellent science fiction/fantasy site, publishing fiction, poetry, reviews, etcetera, with the staff all volunteers but with paid contributors. I use the site quite a lot when doing science fiction or fantasy reviews for the booklog, as their reviewers usually have their heads screwed up straight and I’m always curious to see what they think of the book I’m reviewing.

The Guardian has an interview with noted science fiction writer and friend of the blog Charlie Stross, in which the following quote jumped out at me:

“Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas, rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition,” he says. “I’m not entirely at ease with that self-description.” But with a background in biomedical and computer science rather than literature, his fiction always returns to science. “I just can’t help myself,” he explains. “I have a compulsive urge to use that background to build baroque laboratory mazes for my protagonists to explore, rather than being
content to examine them in their native habitat.”

That one paragraph explains so much about Charlie’s books.

Way back in February, Brad Hicks blogged about a Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s live action science fiction series. No, not Space:1999, but UFO. When he described it, it sounded like it had provided a lot of the inspiration for the only computer game that ever gave me nightmares: UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-Com 1 as it was also known), which I played a lot in
the mid-nineties. Finally having tracked down the DVD set of the series myself and watched the first episode, it does remind me a lot of X-Com. Of course, it’s quite dated, as it’s a 1969 idea of what the far flung future of 1980 would look like, full with men in Nehru suits smoking and drinking in the office while purple wigged women in silver miniskirts watched out for ufos on the moon, while their counterparts on earth wore tight jumpsuits, which showed cameltoe could be a problem in the future as well…

Marco: respect

Football
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oranje after the second goal

Bloody hell.

3-0? Against Italy? The world champion? If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I would not have believed it. All respect to Marco van Basten, the coach, who everybody had already given up on. If you can thrash the world champion like this, you have proved all your critics wrong.

But damn, I thought my heart would burst at some point in the game. It is so un-Dutch to be so commanding in a game I kept expecting the Italians to equalise and then win the game. But they didn’t. For once we had a team that wasn’t just focused on attacking, but which was incredibly strong in defense too. Unbelievable. What a way to start Euro 2008.

Balkenende says: stop whining

Dutch politics
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Balkenende as Harry Potter in a fake movie poster

The British might think that their prime minister is dour, but Gordon Brown has nothing on Jan Peter Balkenende, our national Harry Potter lookalike. He has been a national embarassement from the first moment he awkwardly moved into the spotlight, especially when meeting with foreign leaders, having the knack to even make Bush look good in comparison. You can be a Christian politician and still have a certain style and grace, as his fellow Christian-Democrat Andre Rouvoet shows. But then Rouvoet comes from a proper traditional protestant background, whereas Balkenende is sort of a retro-protestant, not so much a conservative as someone who wants to reinvent the past. A common accusation against Balkenende is that he wants Holland to move back to the fifties, but the fifties he wants us to move back to never existed; Balkenende himself was only born in 1956, so he never experienced the fifties personally. Instead he seems to have build up this idealised vision of a time when Holland was still Holland, with the family as the cornerstone of society, where everybody knew their place and there was a place for everybody, the churches were full on Sunday, brussel sprouts were the national vegetable and everybody worked hard and trusted their betters.

Therefore, unlike previous leaders of the CDA, e.g. Ruud Lubbers, who were largely pragmatic doers, Balkenende sees it as his job as prime minister to scold the rest of us into behaving. Which is why a few weeks back he started complaining that we complain too much in this country, that we should be pleased we are such a rich and prosperous country, grateful that most of us are quite well off. It’s ture that, to put it bluntly, we’re a nation of whingers, as anybody who reads the papers in the runup to and during a major football tournament — like the one which coincidently started this Saturday — knows. This is not a bad thing, unless you’re a moralistic sourpuss like Balkenende, who wants to see us as a nation of happy, uncomplaining worker bees. In my experience, the people who whinge the most about how cynical we are, or how distrustful are almost always snake oil sellers and Balkenende fits that pattern beautifully.

If he had his way, he would prescribe that new drug that makes you trust strangers to the entire Dutch nation, the better to sell his own plans. Apart from his fetish about politeness and respect he’s an empty suit, a hypocrite who obsesses over the motes in our eyes while ignoring the beam in his own, to speak in his own lingo. He worries about the lack of respect the police get while under his leadership we took part in the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, while at home the gap between rich and poor grew so much that we now have food banks in almost all major cities while CEOs get record salaries. No wonder he doesn’t want us to complain: he knows he is the number one target of our complaints.

Interestingly, a majority of the Dutch population does seem to agree with Balkenende that we complain too much. If we can believe the results of a poll doen by one of the free newsrags, sixty percent of us thinks others complain too much, though only nine percent thinks the same about themselves, because whent hey complain, they have good reason to. Myself, I think whinging is a human right and being slightly cynical and whingy makes you less vulnerable to snake oil merchants like Balkie.