For NYT links, you should use the following service--this prevents them from dying after a week when they go into the archives.
http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink
Just raising an inconvenient fact....In my experience of the Irish case, with structural funds etc the EU has consistently been very clear on advertising projects that they have funded. In the 1980s a commonly heard expression was that the German's paid for our roads. That hasn't changed Irish people's rhetorical frames of reference - we still predominatly call ourselves Irish. I find I get categorized as "European" most often in the US, and have felt the strongest sense of being "European" while working in Africa - not as an Irish person living in Ireland. In the Irish case, I think it is safe to argue that material considerations have played a very strong role in Ireland's decision to enter and in Ireland's continued committment to the process, though recently becoming a net financial contributor to the EU hasn't slowed down Ireland's involvement. The bumps along the way (e.g. rejection by the Irish of the Nice referendum first time around) seem to have more to do with the lack of transparency, and lack of imbeddedness of the European political project in domestic politics that people believe they can have some access to and the elite led nature of the project than any (deep) rhetorical reconfiguration. Having said that, European identiy is now a resource that Irish people can use when it suits them, while still talking about "in Europe" when talking about continetal Europe.Bottom line...a much more mixed and confused picture IMHO.
So why did the richer neighborhoods vote yes?Have you ever seen La Grande Illusion? That's why.
Whew, PTJ! I think you got that exactly right. Your riff on identity and the Marshall Plan is a joy.
One of the many divisions in the US right now is between Americans whose identity has been stretched (travel, education, money) to include much of the rest of the world vs. those whose identity is narrower (untrusting when it comes to unfamiliar languages, colors and cultures) and increasingly defensive: "Patriot vs. Liberal."
Wanting to maintain "Frenchness" and "Dutch individuality" is understandable and useful to outsiders who don't want competing economic and political strength in Europe. I think the US has had a hand in derailing ratification of the Constitution, if only temporarily.
the mythical plumber is Polish, i.e. "not one of us Frenchmen,"
No, he's just mythical. A campaign soundbite, used mainly for derision against the nonistes all along.
The mythical (but so yummy!) racist frenchman is alive and kicking, on the other hand. Gets real, real old after a while, too.
If what you want to say is "people who fear outsourcing are racists" just go ahead, but be frank about it.
If not, learn that apart of the usual nationalists (the real ones, that have voted against europe and lost for decades now), the nonistes were all very careful to reaffirm their solidarity, etc, etc, to the workers in all europe and the necessity to build a better one, etc, etc. As usual.
The European Union needs to do something similar,[to the marshall plan]
So... the... feeling of europe sinks in...? I just can't decide what comes on top here, cluelessness, condescension or well meaning?
>>>>>I'd posit that it's the same identity-construction process, but with a different outcome: they voted yes because the framework that structures their daily lives is a "European" one.
--- Isn't it simpler, the rich neighborhoods are made up of people who benefit from the cheap labor of the Polish plumber. They don't see any competition coming from the east.
A larger union ought to be better for trade and therefore improve living standards all around. I suggest two areas where it fails though. 1 -- the monetary union is founded on the wise-men approach, the Euro is grounded in nothing, and so those who save or lend in Euros are at the mercy of the central bank, inflating or deflating on its whim. 2 -- the tax recommendations of the central bank are skewed towards budget balance (ie high taxes -- remember what the e.c.b. said to Ireland for cutting taxes!).
Together these things make for low growth and falling living conditions for workers, as well as choking mobility from the working class to upper levels. That's more than enough to get a no vote, even if the alternative isn't so great.
The PCF(Communists) had as their slogan (I'm paraphrasing) "The peoples of Europe deserve better". The FN , the rightist Catholics and conservatives dwelled on Turkey and on immigration, but the motor of the no campaign was from the left, as demonstrated by the big no votes in the red belt of Paris, for example.
We can try forcing the politics of this into a gooey Lakoff style "frame". Occam's razor suggest that this constitution offended left-wing voters because of its enshrining of free-market dogma as a permanent principle, as well as its elite character and suspciously long and opaque text. Thats a kick not only for the right but the centre-left who were all for this document.
Darmot: I'm not sure your point is as incompatible with Patrick's as you think (see Bill's post above), but the point is extremely well taken.
One of my pet peeves is the way that framing arguments have become associated with Lakoff. The role of framing and frames in political contestation has been a major theme in sociology for at least thirty years. It isn't necessarily "gooey" either, although its more popular form certainly fits that description.
The relationship between interests, identities, and frames deserves much longer analysis. But just as common identities are insufficient for political coordination and collective mobilization, interests are as well. In the absence of "frames" that link them into a predictable/expected course of action, they don't do very much. It seems to me (caveat: as someone who doesn't know a lot about contemporary European politics) that notions of French "identity" and opposition to an "Anglo-Saxon" alternative for Europe help play that role here.
Building off of Dan's point:
While it certainly would be simpler to say that economic interests drive political behavior, that would fly in the face of much of what we know about how people actually come to know what their interests are in a given situation, a process which involves people picking up the rhetorical materials lying around in their everyday lives and deploying them so as to make sense out of ambiguous events. Such as a long, complex, detailed Constitution, which I'll go out on a limb here and speculate that very few of the voters have actually read. So they base their evaluations not on a detailed engagement with the document and the likely consequences of its ratification, but on the way that the overall issue is framed ... which involved a lot of national identity rhetoric.
Just to be clear, I am not actually just saying "people who fear outsourcing are racists," as Anonymous suggests. I'm saying instead that the public rhetoric that was deployed during the campaign about the EU Constitution framed the issues involved in specific ways, and that this had consequences. Whether the framing is a racist one or not strikes me as a separate normative issue, distinct from the explanatory question of why the French electorate rejected the Constitution. Racism, like sexism, seems to me to be a phenomenon to be explained rather than a causal factor doing the explaining. At least in this case.
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