The EU Constitution
A short guide to its key features
"The capstone of a European Federal State" was how Belgian Prime Minster Guy Verhofstadt described the EU Constitution following its agreement on Friday, 18th June, writes Anthony Coughlan of the Irish National Platform. In response, the National Platform, which intends to produce a more detailed analysis in the coming weeks, has prepared this brief commentary.
Eleven points on the Constitution
1. The EU Constitution is a plan for a more centralised, more unequal and more undemocratic EU, further removed from ordinary citizens and more under the control of the political elites of the big member states, especially Germany and France. We say: Yes to democracy, No to an EU Constitution; Yes to Europe, No to an EU State.
2. Up to now the European Union has been based on treaties between its Members. It has been the creation of its Member States and could not exist without them. The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe sets up what is legally and constitutionally a new EU, founded in effect on its own State Constitution. It makes the EU an international actor in its own right, with legal personality and an independent corporate existence for the first time, separate from and superior to its Member States, negotiating and signing treaties with foreign States on behalf of its Members, who will no longer sign treaties in any area covered by the EU. Citizens want their countries to be politically independent, run by governments that are responsible to them. They do not want their countries to become provinces of a centralised EU State whose policies are decided by supranational committees, the European Commission, Council and Court of Justice, which are run by undemocratic elites that are not elected by citizens or collectively under their control.
3. The "Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe" repeals all the existing EU/EC treaties from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Nice and incorporates their main elements into the EU State Constitution. An opportunity has been missed to re-assess those elements and remedy some of the things that are wrong with the EU, for example the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, Euratom, the endless Brussels rules and regulations. The Constitution does not do this.
4. The peoples of Europe have not sought this EU Constitution. Giscard d'Estaing's Convention that drafted it failed to carry out the terms of reference it was given by the EU Governments in the Laeken Declaration.
This called for "more democracy, transparency and efficiency" in the EU, reforms that would bring the EU "closer to citizens" and the possibility of restoring tasks to the Member States." The Constitution does not propose restoring a single power from Brussels to the Member States. Rather, it moves important powers the other way.
5. Article I-10 of the Constitution says: "The Constitution, and law adopted by the Union's Institutions in exercising competences conferred on it, shall have primacy over the law of the Member States." This has never been stated in an EU treaty before. Moreover, it applies to all areas of government, not just the mainly economic areas covered by previous EC/EU treaties. This removes the national democracy and political independence of the Member States. Constitutionally and politically they become like provinces of an EU State, with their national Constitutions and laws made subordinate to the EU Constitution and laws.
6. The Constitution replaces the system of weighted votes for making EU laws that has existed since the 1957 Treaty of Rome by a new system in which laws would be made by a majority of States as long as they contain some two-thirds of the EU's total population. This advantages the big States with their big populations. It gives greater power to Germany and France, which have over one-third of the population of the enlarged EU between them. It would lead to far more EU laws being passed, more centralisation in Brussels and less power for national parliaments and the citizens that elect them. It means less democracy, not more.
7. The Constitution abolishes national control and the national veto in some 30 new policy areas. They include civil and criminal law and procedure, asylum and immigration, Europol and Eurojust, structural funds, commercial treaties dealing with services, culture. People do not want the EU to have more powers, just after the Treaty of Nice and the Treaty of Amsterdam have given it so much more already. They showed that by massive abstention in the European Parliament elections in June, and the election of many Euro-critics to the Parliament.
8. The Constitution abolishes the rotating six-monthly EU presidencies which give each Member State a role in running the EU and replaces them with a five-year Political President, like an ordinary State. It establishes an EU Foreign Minister and diplomatic service, separate from those of its Member States, as well as an EU Public Prosecutor able to prosecute people across national boundaries.
9. The Constitution forbids Member States to operate an independent foreign policy. Article I-15 says "Member States shall actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the acts adopted by the Union in this area." One can show "loyalty" only to what is superior, in this case the EU. The Constitution envisages an EU military alliance and common defence, which would cut across the obligations of the EU's NATO members, while ending the neutrality of its non-NATO ones. The Nice Treaty's provision that the progressive framing of a common defence policy "might lead to a common defence, should the European Council so decide" becomes "Will lead to a common defence, when the European Council, acting unanimously, so decides." There has been no demand from citizens for this.
10. The Constitution greatly extends the scope and competence of the EU by giving its Court of Justice in Luxembourg the power to determine the fundamental rights of EU citizens, overriding national Constitutions and Supreme Courts, as well as the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. It does this by making the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding in EU law. This would bring the EU Court into virtually every area of life and society; for human rights issues arise everywhere - the right the life, family law, property rights, labour law, health and education, religion etc. Human rights standards are not so defective in the EU Member States that they would be improved by giving final power to decide them to the EU Court. In some sensitive areas there are differences in rights standards among EU countries - e.g. preventive detention, trial by jury, narcotics, abortion, euthanasia. Should the EU Court be empowered to lay down a uniform standard for such matters across Europe? This proposal has more to do with power than rights, for the case-law of the EU Court shows that it seeks continually to extend the EU's power into ever wider areas. The EU should respect human rights. It should not be given power to decide our rights.
11. The EU Constitution makes a liberal market economy, maximization of economic competition, laissez-faire, free movement of capital and the privatization of public services into constitutional principles that are immune to legal challenge because of the superiority of EU law over national law. National Constitutions do not seek to pre-empt society's social policy and economic choices in the way the EU Constitution does. In normal democratic societies discussion of such matters and the choice of alternative futures are the stuff of public debate and contention between political parties, and are not laid down as part of the fundamental law of the State, as in the EU Constitution.