-Caveat Lector- www.sundaytelegraph.com/leaders Fortress Europe News: He taunted the police to shoot him. . . and then one of them did THREE people shot, 600 detained, 12 policemen injured, several shops trashed and burned: the 12 hours of non-stop violence which erupted in Gothenburg as European leaders discussed plans to implement the Nice Treaty's commitments last week was bloody and destructive. Already, the riots have been bracketed with Irish voters' rejection of the Nice Treaty as a sign of discontent with "the European project", a harbinger of protests to come. In fact, the riots in Gothenburg were nothing of the sort. They were the result of a small group of thugs who enjoy smashing up and people, and for whom politics and ideology are merely a convenient fig leaf for engaging in their favourite activity. They carried placards saying "Smash capitalism" and banners with pictures of Marx, Lenin and Mao, but no one should take that too seriously: the emphasis was on smashing, not on capitalism, and most of them probably had no idea who the men whose pictures they were carrying were, still less of what Communism is. The rioters in Gothenburg do not represent anything except the thuggish tendency and its delight in destruction. That is why the attempt to link them with the voters who rejected the Nice Treaty in the Irish referendum is completely misplaced. For the voters in Ireland who said "No" were law- abiding citizens, people who pay their taxes, contribute to their society's wealth and have a rational vision of what they want their country to be like - which cannot be said of the thugs who torched Gothenburg. Ireland is the only European country which has actually sought to test whether there is a popular mandate for the Nice Treaty. Its rejection by ordinary voters ought therefore to be profoundly alarming to the bureaucrats and politicians who run the European Union. Unfortunately, they seem to think that popular refusal doesn't count: the right course of action is simply to disregard it, and plough on as if nothing had happened. Europe's ministers have made it clear t hat they do not intend to change a single word of the treaty to placate Irish concerns that it may compromise the country's neutrality - even though, according to EU law, the treaty cannot be valid unless every country ratifies it. Presumably, Eurocrats and Euro-politicians believe that it is time for the Irish government to dissolve their people and elect another. European politicians, however, are not the only ones who have expressed disdain for Ireland's voters. On Friday night, Peter Hain, our new Minister for Europe, insisted that the Irish hadn't really rejected the Nice Treaty - they can't have known what they were voting about, he said, because if they had, they would have voted in favour rather than against it. Mr Hain's contempt for the intelligence of ordinary voters is disquieting. He does not seem to realise that, in a democracy, it is the people who authorise politicians to do things, and not the other way round. The EU has adopted a policy of intransigence on every dot and comma of the Nice Treaty. It is a policy which risks losing it all. The treaty has valuable elements: the enlargement of the Union to include states from Eastern Europe is a sensible move, not least because it will ensure the abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy, which will simply be unaffordable when the Poles, Hungarians and the rest join. Enlargement will also weaken the Franco-German axis at the heart of the EU: that will also be to the good, for it is that axis which has tried to weld Europe into an embryonic super-state. The ambitions of this axis have nurtured the fears of many European voters t hat the EU is increasingly dictatorial, and that its ever-bolder exercise of power is without legitimacy. The Germans, for instance, were not given the opportunity to vote on whether they wanted to keep the mark, or abolish it in favour of the euro, and nor were most of the other countries which have been railroaded into the currency. It may mean that when the time comes to abolish the individual member currencies in 2002, there will be, as the President of the European Parliament has predicted, much more opposition than anyone has bargained for. The real danger to the EU is not thugs throwing bricks at policemen and and looting shops. It is the granite refusal of the organisation's politicians and bureaucrats to consult with the people from whom their authority is supposed to derive. The electors still have the power to throw out governments which they think have ceased to represent their concerns or protect their interests. The politicians cannot use the police to protect themselves from that threat. It is richly symbolic that subsequent European summits are now to be held in Brussels, rather than in the countries which hold the presidency at the time. Under fire, the bureaucrats have retreated to their fortress. But it is not the thuggish unemployed that they should fear. It is the disenfranchised bourgeoisie. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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