Europe's charter for bureaucracy

SALZBURG, Austria - Middle Europe on a sunny afternoon is one of the more pleasant delights of civilization. A well-ordered Hapsburg city like Salzburg, with its parks, statuary, open air cafés, German cuisine (lighter these weight-conscious days but still delicious), and Mozart concerts in the castle overlooking the river that snakes through the town, attracts North American and other tourists avid for history and Austria's famous gemütlichkeit.

Yet beneath its sheen of prosperity, Europe is in trouble. Its economy is still mired in stagnation and, unlike the U.S. economy, there are as yet no signs of a cyclical recovery. Its population is steadily falling -- with the result that it will be unable to pay its baby boomers the pensions they expect in a decade or two. The euro is rising against the dollar, but instead of this being a source of pride, it is pricing European exports out of the market. And the European Union, with its high levels of social benefit and regulation, is saddled with high structural unemployment through both booms and slumps.

Yet Europe's politicians are notably failing to tackle these deep-seated and fundamental problems. Indeed, at the recent European Union summit in Greece, they unanimously agreed to make most of these problems worse by adopting a new Constitution for the European Union that will actually entrench some of the policies causing them.

For instance, the draft constitution will establish a European Bill of Rights. As commentator Iain Murray points out, however, whereas the U.S. Bill of Rights restrains the federal government, its European imitator confers vast and dangerously vague powers on the EU's centralized bureaucracy. It does so by granting what are misleadingly called "positive" rights -- i.e., the right to a job, the right to a "free job placement service" and a whole wish list of labour union demands.

These rights would give the Brussels bureaucracy free license to intervene across the continent to regulate and re-regulate its already sclerotic labour market. One leading German politician lamented that if the constitution were adopted, it would make permanent the very regulations that are slowing down the German economy -- and which even Germany's socialist chancellor is now seeking to amend or repeal.

Britain's Tony Blair is likewise no capitalist reactionary, but his government too is nervous of these provisions on the grounds that they will reintroduce by the European back door the labour union abuses that Margaret Thatcher struggled to erase 20 years ago. And this time they are not merely laws that can be repealed in the ordinary run of politics but constitutional "rights" that could only be removed by a complicated and tortuous process of constitutional amendment.

Any notion of democratic control by the citizenry is rendered still more difficult by two further factors. First, the constitution is almost flagrantly undemocratic -- the only body that can propose and initiate legislation is the unelected EU Commission. In effect, this body of 30 commissioners, all appointed by governments like ordinary bureaucrats, would wield an "advance veto" on new laws. The most that the European "parliament" can do is to reject those commission proposals that it doesn't like. Voters cannot throw the rascals out because they don't choose them in the first place.

And, even if they could throw them out, they would have the greatest difficulty in finding out exactly who the rascals were. Although regular constitutions exist for the purpose of delineating clearly exactly which political authority exercises which power and who is accountable to whom, this proposal is so vague and full of gobbledegook that European Union spokesmen were simply unable to tell inquisitive journalists basic points on power and accountability. Here is an example of its prose: "The Union shall coordinate the policies by which the member states aim to achieve [the Union's] objectives, and shall exercise in the Community way the competencies they confer on it." Competencies? Community way? Who but the bureaucrats can understand this?

And to make the task of voters still more impossible, the constitution centralizes power in Brussels, removing it from national governments like the Spanish and British governments and giving it to a remote bureaucracy unknown to national electorates. And it establishes important new bodies -- such as a European foreign minister who will head a staff of 10,000 diplomats -- to administer a common European foreign policy that is intended eventually to be binding on member-states.

In short, the constitution gives the new European state more powers to regulate the lives of its citizens while making it virtually impossible for those citizens to control the actions of the government through the traditional democratic process. This is a charter for bureaucracy. What is proposed is not a people's Europe but a politicians' Europe.

It might be supposed, therefore, that the politicians would be unable to persuade their voters to accept it -- and The Economist magazine, usually a strong supporter of European integration, has called on them either to radically amend the draft or throw it out altogether. But the politicians are very unlikely to do either -- because they are afraid that if they unpick even a single strand of the carefully agreed draft, the entire thing would unravel. And because it is, after all, a politicians' Europe.

2 posted on 07/11/2003 5:59:56 PM PDT by knighthawk (We all want to touch a rainbow, but singers and songs will never change it alone. We are calling you)

A right to a job for everyone! What about the drug addicts with no sense of responsibility. What happens when they decide to exercise their right to get a job. Under this constitution the government will have to provide a job to this individual, despite the fact that this individual has no sense of self-control. This is just the example that jumped out at me from this article, I'm sure that I could go on and on about other problems with this document.

the constitution is almost flagrantly undemocratic -- the only body that can propose and initiate legislation is the unelected EU Commission....
Voters cannot throw the rascals out because they don't choose them in the first place.

I would do the same thing if I were in their spot. Formation of this totally bureaucratic, all-powerful government, unaccountable to any voters, ought to kick Islamic Law down the calendar a good five to ten years.

Welcome to EURO - the Union of European Soviet Socialist Republics.

Idiots, it didn't work out further East. With all of them cultures and egos, it won't work. Watch for Eu to selfdisintegrate. Hang on to our borders, new wave of immigrants is on the way. They will be much better citizens than them south of the border.

Let's hear it for communism. Maybe our involvement in so many places of the world isn't such a bad thing. I'd rather have troops and diplomats spouting off our Whig ideology than have the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese globally continuing their love affair with Marx.

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