The core fallacy here is comparing the EU treaties and documents with constitutions: it's like saying the body of UK law should be written on one side of A4 paper.
This is an interesting perspective for two reasons: First, comparing the treaty to 'the body of UK law' suggests that it is reasonable to expect people (or parliaments) to take an up-or-down vote on 'the body of UK law' - is there any democratic country in the world that does things that way?
Secondly, I disagree vehemently with the assertion that comparing the treaty to a constitution is a fallacy. A document that establishes division of power between states, a federal level, and the People is, by definition, a constitution (or a constitutional amendment). The fact that it's bundled with a bunch of other legislation does not make it any less so.
As an example, would the Danish constitution cease being a constitution if it was packaged along with some copyright law, a bit of environmental regulation, some agreements on infrastructure policy, etc.? I would say no, that wouldn't make it any less a constitution, it would only make it more of a mess.
Separate the wheat from the chaff is what I say: Let us have a Unionwide referendum on the parts that govern how the Union is structured and how the power is distributed (i.e. the constitutional parts) and leave all the other stuff (infrastructure, environmental policy, deregulation) for the parliament to sift through.
But of course, that would require admitting that the Union is, or will shortly become, a federation. And for some reason our politicians are scared by that perspective.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Anytime you want to persuade the nation states to reconstitute the EU with the citizens of those nation states as the members, feel free: as it stands the states are the members.
I don't hold with the belief that the EU has to become a state to be successful: it seems that it might be able to do something else.
But I will not harp on that any further in this thread, since legitimacy and federalisation was the subject of this thread, and I don't want to threadjack this one by turning it into a discussion of where the Union should go from here. My own views on that matter are summed up in this comment. I am, of course, open to other suggestions as to how to achieve transparency and accountability, but in my thinking those two objectives are of paramount importance. Virtually any other subject is secondary, where the Union is concerned.
In the end, it may be history that writes the Constitution of a federal Europe, by imposing upon Europe threats that it cannot face as a confederation of states ... but a future history in which a confederal Europe is good enough seems like a more pleasant future for most people to live through. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
