The French and Dutch Block the Constitutional Treaty

Abstract

The 2004 Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was meant to bring the European Union and its institutions 'closer to its citizens' (Laeken Declaration on the future of the European Union,15 December 2001), to give birth to a constitutive constitutional moment, European constitutional patriotism, and indeed a European people (see Sternberg 2013, Reh 2009. Ironically, it became the first treaty in the history of European integration to be stopped by popular resistance, expressed in two referendums. On 29 May 2005, 54.7 per cent of French voters rejected its ratification on a 69.7 per cent turnout, and three days later the Dutch followed suit, with 61.5 per cent voting No on an unexpectedly high turnout of 63.3 per cent. This chapter reviews what happened in France and the Netherlands at the time, and what scholarship knows about why people voted the way they did; the roles and dynamics of the referendum campaigns, and domestic and party politics. In doing so it raises the question of how we might know what people's electoral choices may actually have meant to them (see Sternberg 2015a). Of course, the No votes meant No to the draft treaty, but they 'also had multiple other meanings' (Berezin 2009:193). What considerations may the French and Dutch voters have brought to the exercise of choice on the day, what may they have wished to get across with their votes? This chapter brings together available causal explanations of the votes with some 'thick descriptions' of the narratives and discursive repertoires available to people at the time (see, for example, Berezin 2009, Glencross 2009, Sternberg 2015a. What follows is divided into three parts. First, the two referendums' political and discursive backgrounds are introduced. The second section turns to the campaigns, and the third discusses explanations of voting behaviour in these referendums. The conclusion closes on what they may be missing.