Facing the referendum

After Ireland’s No in the first Lisbon referendum, Mr Cowen won some special concessions from his European colleagues to secure a favourable vote second time round. In a gentle but pointed critique of that process, Frank Turner, a British Jesuit, comments: “To reward such bargaining might reasonably irritate countries who ratified quickly, and is, in the long term, a risky strategy. Such last-ditch demands fuel a destructive sense… that the fundamental game is ‘my country versus the other 26’. Frank’s is one of five excellent articles on the Lisbon Treaty in the current issue of Working Notes, the Journal of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. You can access the current issue on the JCFJ website.