THE quest for a European constitution was launched with the best of intentions.
In 2001 the Nice summit, convened to agree rules for an enlarged European Union, had descended into five days and nights of bitter wrangling and the EU’s leaders decided a new way of working was needed.
At the same time, there was mounting evidence that Europe’s citizens were losing confidence in the whole EU project, seeing it as remote, undemocratic and corrupt. Things had to change.
So in December 2001, in the splendour of the palace of Laeken outside Brussels, the leaders issued the “Laeken declaration”. It openly admitted that the EU was in trouble. “The European institutions must be brought closer to its citizens,” it conceded. “They want the European institutions to be less unwieldy and rigid and, above all, more efficient and open.”
And it proposed a solution: the EU, like America, should have a constitution. The aim was to make the arcane workings of the EU accessible to the citizens in one simple document and to determine the balance of power between national governments and EU institutions. If necessary, Brussels would return powers to member governments.
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A “convention” was established to draft the constitution. Under the chairmanship of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President, 105 representatives of national governments, national parliaments, the European Parliament and the European Commission worked for 17 months before handing a draft treaty to the EU’s heads of government in July 2003.
M Giscard warned them not to unpick the document, but the prime ministers began doing just that. Endless meetings between ministers ended in the fiasco of last December’s summit, which collapsed with no agreement. It is touch and go whether today’s Brussels summit can clinch the deal, but even if it does it is clear that the original good intentions have been lost along the route. The final document is more than 300 pages long and written in legalese. It is repetitive, turgid and often utterly incomprehensible. The most intelligible part — the Charter of Fundamental Rights — is misleading. Clauses have been attached to ensure that it only applies to EU laws, not to national laws. “It’s all Alice in Wonderland” said one EU diplomat.
In not a single area does the constitution return power to member states. In fact it centralises power in around 30 different areas of policy.
Far from being a broad-brush document establishing basic principles, it delves into the minutiae of policy areas that are the domain of the nation state — a last-minute addition insists that all member states have a strategy for dealing with domestic violence. Many of the suggestions for reforming EU institutions are of little interest to EU citizens. Even if the summit agrees the constitution, it may prove stillborn. It must be ratified by the peoples or parliaments of all 25 member states over the next two years, and that is a tall order in eurosceptic countries like Britain, Denmark and the Czech Republic.
POLITICAL WISH LIST
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The top five things that the big three political parties want changed in the European constitution:
LABOUR