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Article: Irish No vote puts a spanner in the works; Rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum leaves rest of EU with egg on their faces.(News)
- Article from:
- The Star (South Africa)
- Article date:
- December 5, 2008
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BYLINE: Peter Fabricius
The Eurocrats in Brussels are surely muttering "too much democracy can be a bad thing" this week after the Irish rejected the Lisbon Treaty, which would have taken the European Union a big step closer to full union.
It would have given the EU its first full-time president and a powerful foreign policy chief, as well as other institutions and changes to weld the 27 member nations into something significantly closer to the vision of a single and very powerful state.
After the lost referendums in France and the Netherlands two years ago over the proposed European constitution - an even more potent instrument of integration ...