Like everyone else, I am thoroughly fed up with the coverage of the ‘no’ vote on the Lisbon Treaty. Like many of my friends, but also like the Government, I believe the vote signalled true democracy – the people had their say.
Before I go any further let me say straight out: I voted ‘no’ in the Lisbon Treaty referendum for a variety of reasons, the main one being the potential of militarisation. I liked the ‘People before Profit’ coalition’s slogan – ‘For a Europe for people – not profit or war’ – and believed then, as I do now, that our politicians asked us to trust them although they spent almost no time putting a clear case for a ‘yes’ vote. While I do agree with the ‘yes’ voters that the EU did have some good influence on Ireland, by and large the ‘no’ vote was democracy in action, and the result will no doubt lead to some serious rethinking in Europe.
One important issue, however, did not get a proper airing in the post-referendum media coverage. While the issue of race and immigration did not surface openly, once the vote was cast, all the anti-immigration pundits climbed out of their holes. Suddenly people were telling The Guardian that they voted ‘no’ because migrant workers were undercutting them in the job market. And not so suddenly, the anti-immigrant Immigration Control Platform – which aims to “address the phenomenon of immigration to Ireland and to lobby Government for a tight immigration policy... in relation to asylum-seekers, refugees, and a determined response to all illegal immigration” – was also celebrating the rejection of the treaty.
According to the Irish Independent, a major survey of voters conducted by the European Commission immediately after the referendum showed that immigration was an unspoken factor in the vote, as people expressed concern about the numbers of immigrants coming to the country in such a short time. The rise in unemployment, allied to foreign workers coming to the country, was also cited. We ought to reflect on this. Since the mid 1990s, the State kept referring to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants as a ‘problem’, inventing terms such as ‘bogus refugees’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ and claiming asylum seekers were telling ‘cock and bull stories’. Is it any wonder that when the economy shows signs of slowing down, many Irish people internalise these messages? The French sociologist Etienne Balibar calls this ‘crisis racism’: blaming incoming migrants for the problems of the system.
Migrants are blamed for everything from over-crowded hospitals and schools to the slowdown in the economy, for marrying our daughters and sisters, for taking jobs from us. The road from this to some people voting ‘no’ in an EU referendum is short – the EU is seen, erroneously of course, as encouraging migration, whereas in reality its main message is closing the gates of ‘Fortress Europe’. So let’s be clear – many of us voted ‘no’ to L i s b o n , even though we are pro-immigration, proequality and pro-choice.
The Europ e a n e m p i r e needed t a k i n g down a notch, but this does not mean those of us on the left who voted ‘no’ align themselves with the anti-immigrant brigade.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann
