Are we fools led by liars? (THE EU CONSTITUTION EXPLAINED)

The EU constitution makes tough reading, but its meaning - and its danger - couldn't be clearer

WHO’S GOT it right? The German Minister for Europe, Hans Martin Bury, or the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, Jack Straw? Last week Herr Bury told the Bundestag that the constitution of the European Union is more than a “milestone”, it is “the birth certificate of the United States of Europe”. Last month Mr Straw said that the constitution treaty signalled “thus far and no further on European integration”. Is the treaty a boundary marker for European integration or is it a birth certificate for “a single European state bound by one European constitution”, to use the language of the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer?

One may doubt how many people have yet read the constitution. Since the early phases of drafting, I have been reading it and re-reading it. In this process I’ve kept in touch with David Heathcote-Amory, the Conservative MP for Wells, who was a member of the convention on the EU constitution. I hope everyone will read the treaty, though they may not find it much fun.

The treaty is indeed complex. If the convention had followed the example of the framers of the American Constitution, it might have produced a skeleton constitution. Unfortunately, the constitution includes quantities of material of a quite unsuitable kind, in an apparent attempt to dictate not only the structure but the long-term political objectives of the European Union.

For instance, Title 1 includes a statement of objectives which would be better suited to a party manifesto than to a constitutional document. Article 3 reads: “The Union shall work for sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and with a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.”

We have to take this seriously, but these aspirations are neither defined nor justiciable. Suppose they were brought in front of the European Court of Justice, on the complaint that the European institutions were failing to achieve these objectives.

What is “sustainable development”? How can Europe achieve “balanced economic growth”? What does “balanced” mean in that context? Is “economic growth” desirable in all circumstances? What is a “social market”? In what ways does it differ from an ordinary “market economy”? Can a “social market economy” be “highly competitive”, or will its social character be a hindrance to its competitiveness? What is the appropriate level of full employment? Is it 3 per cent unemployment, as Lord Beveridge once suggested? Is it the 10 per cent which is the current German level? What is “social progress”? Can it be measured by income differentials? Or by educational standards? Might there not be a conflict between social progress and economic growth? How does one measure the “improvement of the quality of the environment”? Indeed, what is “the quality of the environment”? How should Europe promote “scientific and technological advance”? By subsidies? How would they fit in with fair competition?

Whenever one dips into the constitution one is liable to sink into a bog of unexamined propositions. I cannot think of any document of comparable historic importance which raises so many questions or answers so few. As an American scholar has observed, the European constitution, if it were American, would raise numerous Supreme Court cases in every paragraph.

Nevertheless, the constitution does two things which do allow one to answer the question: boundary stone or birth certificate? It creates a state. Article 11: “The constitution establishes the European Union.” Article 15a: “The constitution . . . shall have primacy over the law of the member states.” Article 18: “Every national of a member state shall be a citizen of the union.”

This new state will have broad and predominant powers, with ministers to execute those powers. Article 111: “The member states shall co-ordinate their economic and employment policies within arrangements as determined by Part 3, which the union shall have competence (power) to provide . . . the union shall have competence to define and implement a common foreign and security policy, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy.”

The EU is already proceeding step by step to the establishment of this common foreign and security policy. Nato is being downgraded; a European diplomatic service is being developed; the constitution provides for a Foreign Minister. The whole European structure has been built by general aspirations backed by creeping bureaucracy. The common foreign and defence policy is likely to become a fait accompli.

I sometimes think that Britain has a Government which takes us all for fools. There may be a case for a United States of Europe. Many continental Europeans believe in that; most Germans, for instance, see a single European state as a natural development, similar to the creation of a united Germany in the 1870s. Britain, as Franz-Josef Strauss used to say, should have the status in a United Europe which Bavaria has in the Federal Republic. Bavaria, he would add, does not feel any need for a separate air force. Some Germans differ. One recently commented to me: “What is the problem for which the European Union is the solution?”

We could have a useful debate on these issues. Is it Europe’s destiny to become a superstate? Is the age of British independence at an end? Can we protect democracy and the rule of law in a fully united Europe? That would be an honest and historic debate. But it cannot be an honest debate so long as the Government pretends that the European constitution is anything other than a constitution for the United States of Europe. The Germans are telling the truth. So long as our Government takes us for fools, we have every reason to take them for liars.

This is a marketing ploy, not a constitution.

Very true...

After a long marketing study and research... They find that is the product they can sell in Europe for the Europeans.

The era of nation-states are over. Small or medium size countries can not dream "independece" and "soverginity"... Together they can have more power than the sum of their weight separatley.

They building it for over 50 years slowly and steadily. The new members always queing and so far all of them happy with Ukraine and Turkey in the line too... (Ok... Britain trying to sit on two horses with one arse and always complaining...)

I am sure that if it were not the Iraq war disagreement, there woud not be so much EU bashing from the western side of the Atlantic....

I know the steam need to be let out...

But be honest... A collapsed EU would make a great dent on the US economy. Can you afford the loss of a market of almost half a milliard people with their high tech demands ?

Ciao MadIvan,

Lots of money + lots of confusion + no accountability = lots of corruption.

You're lucky. In the UK you're debating the fine points. Here in Italy, as was the case in Spain, acceptance is a foregone concusion. The only issue that saw the light was whether or not to mention Europe's Christian heritage in the preamble.

For psychological reasons, (love of your own history and traditions and resultant - sacrosanct - unwillingness to lose a cuticle of soverignty, important Colonial past, Commonwealth, special relationship with America) but above all because of your different, Common Law legal system, I wonder if UK even belongs in the Union.

That's not for me to say, but if I were the Grand Controller, I'd demand 2/3ds approval of any state before entry, because what's really missing in the equation is genuine popular enthusiasm.

With interest, love, enthusiasm, excitement, goodwill, the problems resulting from a somewhat necessarily hodgepodged constitution can all be hammered out.

I say necessarily hodgepodged because this isn't like smoothing out the differences between Connecticut and Virginia, this is bonding atavistic enemies;

It's almost as difficult as making Beelzebub swim in a pool of Holy Water; uniting Italians who could use training from Ugandans on how wait on line at the Post office with the regimented Finns; making the Dutch who have harlots in the windows and Hashhish shops get along with the still somewhat Ancient Greeks;

Every single country in Europe loves the other and loves to hate the other with almost equal intensity. And the reasons for that wonderful mixture of love and contempt are real and resonating.

I remember when French Vintners were spilling truckloads of cheap Southern Italian wine; the French throwing eggs back at the Belgians. I know I'm a spaghetti-fressing charlatan for the Germans, the only people on earth who seem to actually enjoy bad moods. The Slovaks in central Slovakia despise the Hungarians (paradoxically those on the Hungarian border don't!); the Brits following their soccer teams destroy foreign cities. But in all this how can one not love Great Britain, Finnland, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Germany. And I mean really like them?

It's a fine mess.

For me it is unacceptable even at the moment that UK (and also Sweden) are part of Europe for the simple reason that they refuse the Euro. I have no idea why that was allowed. Either you're in the poker game or you're out. That's my mentality. And there's nothing wrong with either stance. The Norwegians and the Swiss aren't in and they're doing fine via bilateral agreements.

Anyway, all that Europe has going for it is a bureau-technocratic form of Manifest Destiny and so given this present spirit, or rather lack of spirit, the British view of just a mere Free Trade zone is the most realistic and all that Europe really deserves. Countries mustn't lose sovereignty to feed some fatalistic blob. If they're gonna marry it'd better be love. Some kind of zeal where one is truly convinced that the whole is greater than the sum of its components.

Without the Schuhmans, Adenaurs and De Gasperis, without the students rushing to raise the barriers the original Common Market wouldn't have been possible. Yes after the war, Germans and French kids did that and they hugged each other with tears in their eyes saying: BASTA! Ca SUFFI! GENUG! And that worked.

Without similar leaders and similar GENUINE forms of enthusiasm, it's premature to move beyond.

In other words, I feel that Europe is taking a step longer than her legs.

It's also unfair to the new entrants such as Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Rep. etc. who haven't had enough time to express their societies after release from the Soviet yoke.

So that's my position. While actually criticizing UK for her selfish "me me me" attitude, I agree with her, because at least she's honest and upfront, whereas most of the other countries are now that way in their hearts, worried only about immediate gain... no vision, no real glue.

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