the head of the Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, on the 2005 French referendum on the Lisbon Treaty:
"If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'."
the result being that the French rejected it, but it was adopted regardless
1. The French didn't hold a referendum on Lisbon
2. The treaty was ratified in 2008
Presumably you are either confusing the referendum on the EU constitution with the Lisbon treaty, or trying to suggest that they are one and the same? They are not of course, the Lisbon treaty was drafted specifically to address the concerns with the EU constitution. "The electorate rejected version 1, so we redrafted until it was acceptable" sounds like a pretty good policy to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratification_of_the_Treaty_of_...
the Treaty was a device created to pass the constitution while bypassing the need for referendums
> "The electorate rejected version 1, so we redrafted until it was acceptable" sounds like a pretty good policy to me
well yes, that sounds reasonable, except the electorate were not given the option to reject it a second time, because they might actually do that
I am not aware of any such thing, in fact I reject your statement completely.
> the electorate were not given the option to reject it a second time Isn't that a matter for France to address, rather than the EU
Needless to say, this has now been repeated, again, and again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...
And of course, one might say that the EU treated the election results in Greece, Italy, France and Germany with utter contempt. Greece most of all, of course, but the others aren't far behind.
The question asked was « Do we accept this constitution ? »
As you can imagine, barely anyone read it, so on the end most of voters choosed their response on this question : « Do I like my actual government ? »
But my point is, for the Brexit the question was simple, and could have been summarized as « Leave or stay ? » which is very easy to have an opinion on (even if the consequences were not that clear and, as many have stated in other comments here, an elaborated exit treaty should have been thought before asking).
So one one side, a complex question (due to the complexity of the text), and on the other a simple one.
And in the end, most of voters voted emotionally.
Maybe not that different after all.
So even if there had been a pre exit agreement to be vote for in the Brexit one, it might ended the same. Leave or stay. And I’m not sure UK people would have read it (but I may be completely wrong by projecting how we did in France)
I think your conclusion is right. Having an agreement worked out first probably wouldn’t have changed much.
Opponents (on the left side of French politics) to the European Constitution argued that rejecting it would allow France to open negotiations for a more social leaning EU that didn't try to be only a giant free trade zone, but would also care about the well-being of its citizens (social net, minimum wage, etc.). We've seen where that went: there never was a Constitution B. No-one ever agreed to even try to write one. In short: just like for the Brexit, there never was any concrete plan behind the "no".
Ironically UK managed to duck out of most of the Lisbon treaty obligations (like the Charter of Fundamental Rights, judicial harmonisation and co-operation, etc.), while it would have been much harder -if not impossible- to do with the European Constitution... Had we (the French) voted "yes", we may have ended up with a Brexit 10 years before Brexit!
Now that they did, it's reasonable to have another referendum on those specific terms. To not do so would be undemocratic, in fact.
From being an outsider (I have never even visited UK yet), it seems to me from talking to people and reading the news it was more a vote about "do you like how the things are now and where they are headed, or would you like ... something else"? Something else could have been not necessarily Brexit, as long as it was drastic enough change from the status quo.
And I think a good number of people are just dissatisfied and thought this gamble for a drastic change would perhaps improve things.
I think most people voting in the 2016 referendum were, in their minds, answering the question "do you want to give th establishment a good kicking?".
Doesn’t make sense to me. Seems analogous to getting fed up with shady mechanics, so the next time your car breaks down you drive it over a cliff in the hopes that the wreckage will be more reliable. But I guess people do strange things when they feel like they have no control.
Exactly. Desperate people who don't see anything in the future for them or see thing getting worse, don't usually act rationally. Poverty does that to people as well, for example, and that's visible daily. They resort to payday loans, food they buy might not be healthy for them in the long term and so on.
On the other side there are usually powerful forces willing to take advantage of that irrationality and desperation.