Post-Election 2008: Academics assess meaning of failed UN referendums

President-elect Ma Ying-jeou, left, and vice president-elect Vincent Siew are pictured on the Xinhua news agency Web site yesterday. The headline reads ''Taiwan Area leadership election completed.'' PHOTO: CNA

The failed passage of both UN referendums in Saturday's election may have sent a message to the world that Taiwanese do not care about the country's admission to the UN, a group of foreign and local academics said yesterday during a roundtable in Taipei.

Calling the failed referendum a "miserable story," Gunter Shubert, from University of Tuebingen's Institute of Chinese and Korean Studies, said that not only was the collective will of Taiwanese falsely represented, but the referendum, as a political instrument, was "misused and degraded" in this election, as both camps used it to boost the interests of the party rather than to mirror what the people wanted.

Both referendums were also poorly formulated, he said.

The referendums proposed by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Taiwan's UN bid were held in tandem with the presidential election on Saturday.

The DPP called on voters to agree on Taiwan applying for a full UN membership under the name "Taiwan," while the KMT version asked for support for Taiwan to re-enter the body as the "Republic of China," or under any other "practical" titles.

The referendums failed as the 35 percent turnout fell short of the required threshold of more than 50 percent of eligible voters, even though the DPP proposal received a 94 percent "yes" vote and the KMT proposal was approved by 87 percent.

Aside from specialists and those who followed the matter closely, most people will likely equate the low turnout with lack of desire for membership in the global body, Shubert said.

If Taiwan continues to misuse referendums, he said, people will eventually start to lose faith in the tool.

Christopher Hughes, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said the Beijing government could spin the results and argue that the referendum defeat showed that most Taiwanese do not wish to be independent from China.

Shortly after the result was announced on Saturday night, Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office released a statement saying the failed referendum meant that "the issue of independence has not won the heart of the Taiwanese people."

Asked if he believes Taiwan can recover from the setback, Hughes said: "The situation cannot be worse than it is right now," adding that Taiwan should develop better public relations strategies to win more support.

Lin Cheng-yi (林正義) of Academia Sinica lamented the fact that the issue of Taiwan's entry in the UN has become politicized, which the splintered results made evident.

"If it had been the UN that conducted the referendum on Taiwan's membership, the result would have been overwhelmingly different," he said.

At a separate forum hosted by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy yesterday, political observers said newly elected president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) needs to think hard about how he will explain the failure of the referendums to the rest of the world.

Lee Yeau-tarn (李酉潭), an associate professor at National Chengchi University's Sun Yat-sen Graduate Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, said "the failure of the two referendums was regrettable."

"What is even more regrettable is that the result was interpreted in such a way that would make it appear that the referendums were voted down, which is not the case," Lee said.

Highlighting the problem of the threshold, Lee said, is the fact that "the legislature would have been an illegitimate institution if the 50 percent turnout was an appropriate threshold."

"A 35 percent turnout isn't that bad," Lee said, adding that in 2005, the turnout at the National Assembly on approving a constitutional reform package that determined a legislative reform proposal was 23 percent.