Last week, a nice middle-aged lady from the Christian Solidarity Party called to my door to canvass for a No vote in the Nice Treaty referendum. She gave me a leaflet published by the well-funded No to Nice Campaign and her own party's literature, saturated with the usual wild-eyed paranoia of the far right.
Nice will lead to "Soviet-style government" throughout Europe. The International Criminal Court "can be used to restructure family life and religious practice". Its definition of forced pregnancy (such as the horrific rape camps of Bosnia) as a war crime is really an attempt to outlaw opposition to abortion. A constitutional ban on the death penalty "could allow a prisoner to be executed whilst appealing his conviction or sentence". To anyone who remembers the various abortion and divorce referendums, none of this nonsense is at all surprising. What did come as a shock, though, was that the nice lady then handed me another leaflet. "Take this as well," she said. "We're all working together." She gave me the No to NATO/No to Nice pamphlet issued by Irish CND and the Peace and Neutrality Alliance.
The honourable left-wing anti-militarist tradition that dates back at least to Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and James Connolly has been subsumed into the paranoid xenophobia of the far right. Intellectually and culturally, the two traditions may be poles apart. But in terms of the practical politics of this week's referendums they have been fused into one big, capacious conspiracy theory.
If this seems harsh, compare the rightwing paranoia of the Christian Solidarity Party's "Soviet-style government" with the leftwing paranoia of an Afri leaflet that parodies the 1916 proclamation and declares "the right of the US-European Empire to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies" and proclaims "the Irish Republi c as a fully-owned subsidiary of the US-European Empire".
THE sad thing is that there are real issues to be addressed in any serious debate about the EU, NATO, the UN and the role of Ireland in the defence and security architecture of Europe. A No vote would, for instance, be appropriate revenge for Bertie Ahern's treachery on the issue of Irish membership of the Partnership for Peace. The Taoiseach's statements on PfP, like the ludicrous claim that it has nothing to do with NATO, have been deeply dishonest.
The most forceful contribution from either side, moreover, has been Andy Storey's Afri pamphlet The Treaty of Nice, NATO and a European Army. Storey's principal point is that EU defence and security policy is intimately bound up with NATO and that NATO itself is often a threat to democracy and human rights, driven as much by the interests of the arms trade as by the dictates of international law.
In this, he is absolutely right. We know from the experience of the Kosovo war that the moral aim of intervening to prevent genocide was subverted by NATO's determination to let gung-ho bombers attack civilian targets in Serbia. We know, too, from George W. Bush's repudiation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and enthusiasm for the mad Star Wars scam that the political influence of the arms industry is still immense. To have deep misgivings is entirely reasonable.
THOSE concerns, though, need to be weighed against the huge opportunities for genuine progress that the Nice Treaty offers. Those of us who hated the old cold war division of Europe and the real threat of nuclear war that it entailed long dreamed of the day when "Europe" would not just be a synonym for the West and when a genuinely pan-European security system would come into being. Expanding the EU into the countries of central and Eastern Europe does vastly more to achieve that aim than anything else that has happened since the end of the second World War.
As for NATO, it is surely obvious that the only serious alternative to remaining under American control is the development of an independent European defence and security capacity. As Andy Storey acknowledges, many on the American right see the developments emerging under the Amsterdam and Nice treaties not as a boost to NATO but as a threat to US hegemony in Europe.
If Nice is part of an American-led NATO plot, why is the American right so worried about it? Why is money from American conservative groups backing the No campaign here? And, if not through the EU, how are we in Ireland to fulfil our moral and legal obligations to intervene against genocide? After Srebrenica, when the UN stood and watched while the biggest massacre of civilians in Europe since the second World War was happening before its eyes, the old answers are no longer good enough.
In reality, what really matters for us is not the structures that will continue to evolve in Europe, but what we choose to do or not to do within them. Putting into Irish law the verbal assurances that the Government has given us would make far more sense than blocking the best chance for peace and security that many of our fellow Europeans have ever had.