There is only one good argument in favour of voting Yes and only one good argument in favour of voting No in this Nice referendum, writes Vincent Browne. Everything else is bogus. The good argument for voting Yes is simple: voting No could delay or obstruct eastern Europeans having the option to join the EU.
The good argument for voting No is that the EU project is undemocratic and the Nice Treaty fails to address that issue (again) and marginally deepens the undemocratic nature of the Union.
The stuff about protecting jobs, prosperity and our place and influence in Europe is nonsense. The stuff about being propelled into a military alliance and being marginalised by the enhanced co-operation provisions is also bogus.
Last time, I voted No because of the democratic argument and because I felt the way the proposal was being put to the Irish people, in the form of an incomprehensible treaty, was an expression of contempt for them. Of course, both arguments remain but the second is now less persuasive because we have had more time to debate the treaty. What is more persuasive is the argument about delaying or obstructing eastern Europeans from getting in to the Union.
The negotiating process to incorporate a further 10 members into the existing 15-member European Union has been hugely complex. It has also raised anxieties and stirred prejudices among Germans, Austrians and French against eastern Europeans which, if allowed time to fester, might change the disposition of the governments of those countries to enlargement. In other words, if enlargement is delayed because of an Irish No vote, the admission of some eastern Europeans might be delayed and they might be offered admission on terms they might find unacceptable.
There has been much blather about how the EU has stabilised a volatile Europe, which was convulsed by two World Wars. The decisive shift that occurred after the second World War was the emergence of two superpowers, which guaranteed stability in both western and eastern Europe until the rivalry between them dissolved with the collapse of communism in 1991. So spare us the St Francis of Assisi visionary stuff about the EU bringing us peace where there was conflict.
But things have changed. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, it has become possible to tie in eastern Europe into a democratic stable international structure, which should guarantee a measure of (internal) democracy for those countries for maybe a century (who can guess what might happen in a longer perspective?). This could help them economically and give them a sense of protection from the unstable nuclear giant on their borders. They may also benefit in the way we did economically and socially from EU membership (look at the benefits brought in terms of women's rights).
Do we want to fool around with that prospect? There is much about the European project that is objectionable. There is the arrogance of the European elite which, if it could, would decide Europe's future itself, not trusting the populace to comprehend the magnificence of its vision. Allied to that is what they call "the democratic deficit". There was a "democratic deficit" in Franco's Spain, in Hitler's Germany, in Pinochet's Chile, in Stalin's Russia but we didn't call it a "democratic deficit", we called it dictatorship.
We can hardly characterise the EU as a dictatorship but it is certainly not a democracy, in the sense of it being accountable to the people of Europe. And nothing mooted so far in the European Convention does anything to address the scale of the deficit.
There is another problem too, to which John Rogers alluded in this newspaper last Saturday. The European project started out as an organisation of states, each state equally represented through the existence of a veto over most issues. The veto has been eroded, for lots of good reasons, but that has left an inequality between the states, in contrast with the constitutional structure of the US where, via equal representation in the Senate, there is an acknowledgement of equality.
The Nice Treaty deepens that inequality and that "deficit" through the further erosion of the veto but only marginally.
And there is the new liberal agenda, which is at the heart of the Euro ethos, the messianic attachment to the idea of a free market, as though there were no downsides. The less "marketable", the vulnerable, will suffer in such an environment and there will be many of those among the 100 million eastern Europeans waiting to join (but would they be any better off outside?).
These remain reasons to oppose the drift of the EU but is now the time to stand in the way, when doing so delays the embrace of eastern Europe away from the chill of the enduring menace of an unstable Russia?
So I am going to be one of the swing votes this time. I will be voting Yes on Saturday but I will return to the No fold on the referendum on the new European constitution being drafted by the ineffectual convention, if anything like what is being mooted emerges. And I urge readers to vote Yes too this time and then wait in the long grass.