But most of the world, these days, calls any decision by direct popular vote a referendum. Democratic nation-states dislike them, feeling that they confess a failure of representative democracy. France is one country that has tried to tame the referendum. At first, French republicans damned it as a tool of Bonapartism, since it was used by Napoleon III in the nineteenth century to bypass parliaments and base his dictatorship on “the people.” But later, republicans worked the measure into their curious rules for orderly regime change: first a revolution, then a provisional government to prepare elections for a constituent assembly to draw up a new Constitution; next comes a referendum to approve the Constitution; and then, finally, the first parliamentary elections of the new Republic. [...]
Behind referendums and plebiscites lies the idea of popular sovereignty. But does that legitimize a “right to self-determination,” when it’s a vote about leaving an existing nation state? That right is, anyway, a fine-sounding collective right, which is almost impossible to define, let alone to enforce. It can be made to mean almost anything: for instance, German postwar “expellees” from Central Europe claimed that it meant their right to return to their homeland and evict the Polish and Czech settlers who had replaced them. [...]
The central factor in referendums is who has the right to call them. Formally, the Kurdish and Catalan referendums were both illegal because neither the Iraqi nor the Spanish government licensed them. (But the European Union showed despicable hypocrisy in snubbing the Catalans, since more than half the EU’s members only exist because they broke away from larger states without permission or prior referendum). Some places—California and Switzerland among them—have for many years granted a specified minimum of petitioners the right to call a referendum. But now, globalized social media is transforming the whole ballot initiative question. A ceaseless torrent of organized demands for change is spreading the habit of direct democracy, which is already bypassing traditional legislatures. Referendums, vulnerable to demagogues and lies as they certainly are, look set to carry the politics of the future.
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