`War is Peace!" the propaganda slogan shouts in 1984. Or was it "Peace is War"? The words had a similar ring to Fianna Fail's pre-election promise that a referendum on joining Partnership for Peace would be held (but of course!), way back when.
The Treaty of Rome was passed to make sure Big Brother couldn't rule some parts of Europe. People had been through hell. Centuries of tribal conflict led to regional wars, and then the 20th century arrived.
If man was in fact the measure of all things, mankind was in serious trouble. The carnage and suffering witnessed all over Europe put anything happening in Ireland in the shade. It still does.
The luxury of forgetting was enabled by both the Free State and the Republic of Ireland. Hey, we're above all that. Irishness was the measure of mankind, and our neutral, superficially anti-militarist attitudes suggested that if we were running the world, wars would simply stop happening.
The journey I had to make to vote for any European treaty was on the single issue of militarisation. For that, read "neutrality". The two were linked, until I thought about it.
There's something about Irish neutrality that makes people sound as though they're speaking in capital letters, or italics at least.
Because Irish neutrality is part of what we thought we were. Like Orwell's characters in the original Big Brother, the concept was so close to our collective bosoms we rarely put it on parade. Irish neutrality was like breathing Irish air. For me, it meant being anti-militarist, opposing the lies that claim wars never touch civilian populations, or that soldiers are ennobled by their experiences.
It meant opposing the armaments industry that wreaked such havoc in Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and generally condemning others for their lack of humanity, collusion with vested interests, and refusal to put people first.
BUT opposition to militarism is a different position than being neutral. The cost of not having the PfP debate Bertie promised compromised it greatly, sending it spinning through the narrow-mesh politics of the pro- and anti-Nice campaigns.
All the suppressed arguments around militarism and demilitarisation were hijacked by Other Big Ideas who took them hostage, and used them otherwise.
So those who distinguished anti-militarism from knee-jerk nationalism, or indeed support for the IRA, are now enmeshed with Ireland's vote against enlargement, and its lowrent debate on "sovereignty", along with all the exclusion implied. In Big Brother's spirit, a vote against militarism counts as a vote against enlargement, which for some is not what the vote was all about.
It is intensely frustrating, maddening, for many anti-militarists that Bertie Ahern locked the debate into the Nice campaign, having already presented a fait accompli on PfP. It feels as though he is mocking the position, or indicating a lack of respect. But a worse vacuum is beckoning. Those who railed against the lack of democratic structures in the EU are now appointing themselves guardians and sacred custodians of the No vote.
On checking the ballot paper, I note the absence of a question they seem to have answered for themselves. I saw no question giving a mandate to any of the so-called No to Nice campaign members to speak on behalf of those who voted No.
Who are they to speak for others, without a democratic permission?
Did you know when you voted No or didn't vote at all that you would be represented by them? Was your apathy a mandate to them? The self-styled representatives who met Romano Prodi, and are attempting to negotiate with the Government (democratically elected, whatever we think about it), are less representative than a delegation chosen randomly from the population.
The few who are elected democratically represent less than 4 per cent of a general election vote, on a good day. The others would have found it difficult to get elected to a bus queue. Now they are assigning themselves the authority to speak of an Ireland where the only good citizen is an old-style nationalist, and the only good is to oppose "Europe". Orwell couldn't have imagined the muddle better.
Except on militarism. This issue gives status to what otherwise is a vote in need of analysis, but please, not from the people who are currently telling us what it means.
IF fairness matters, there might as well be a lottery to appoint No voters and non-voters' representatives to the proposed Forum. Think about it: that's how juries are appointed and they work well.
The two-track Europe the self-appointed leaders speak of will become a three-track Europe faster than they think.
Track One: the core countries; Track Two: the new applicants; and Track 3: the Republic of Ireland, nobly running there all on its own, having squandered its political capital while making national celebrities of the unmandated folk now rushing to fill the political void.
mruane@irish-times.ie