A Constitutional

So in the UK the pointless machinations continued last week. The Tories were in a pickle because the Liberal Democrats wouldn’t support their calls for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and the Liberal Democrats for their part pointed out that the referendum wouldn’t be about the treaty, but rather about the UK’s membership of the EU full stop, and that we should just have a referendum on that. Both the Government and the Liberal Democrats used the ‘excuse’ that the Lisbon Treaty is an amending treaty and not a constitution, and therefore not the thing that each promised a referendum on in their manifesto at the last election. I have to say I have some sympathy with this. The document itself is all half-sentences and paragraphs for insertion and is not a coherent whole, which, taken alone makes little or no sense, and therefore to hold a referendum on it would seem a little ludicrous, as very few people would be willing to read the document and the previous three treaties required for it to make sense. So the politicians would have to surmise what the changes are to make their cases in a referendum and such summations are bound to be bent one way or another according to the particular interpreter’s feelings about Europe. Of course I understand that it is the nature of all political debate that statistics, figures and most especially obtuse legal documents can be and are argued about endlessly from whichever viewpoint one cares to take, but a document like the Lisbon Treaty gives a vast amount of rope to anyone wishing to swing any way they like. In this sense the EU and indeed the people of Europe have missed a trick with a written constitution.

A constitution would be a single document that would replace all the various establishing and amending treaties that have gone before it. It would be easy to argue for or against, because it would be the whole thing, a complete description of the Europe that we wish for, whatever that wish might be. Note that I say ‘a constitution’, not ‘the constitution’, for in a way many of the moaners at Westminster have it right, just the wrong way around: the rejected constitution was too similar to the Lisbon treaty and the others that have gone before it. What we need for Europe is a constitution fundamentally rebuilt from the ground up, not plastered around the cracks in the existing structure. Furthermore – here’s a radical idea – we could actually ask the people of Europe how they’d like that Europe to be built. I’m not the biggest fan of focus group politics – I believe that it has led British politics to its current apathy fuelled stalemate – but there is a place for focus groups in every political system; when was the last time anyone heard of EU wide consultation on the structure of the European political system?

Well I've done my research now, and I can confirm that there was a consultation before the failed constitution, it was known as the European Convention and it consisted 'mainly of representatives of national parliaments, not only from existing member states but also from candidate countries, as well as representatives of heads of state and government.' Apparently it was tasked with consulting as widely as possible about the structure of the Union. I'm sure that they did consult 'as widely as possible', as long as the phrase is caveated with 'amongst other politicians'.

Of course Commissioners, members of national governments and probably MEPs would say that this is a complete consultation, as the consultation of the people happens through the process of electing the MEPs and national governments, who in turn nominate their commissioners (for now). However to say that is meaningless for two simple reasons: firstly, the approach to Europe as a policy in of and as of itself is so far down the list of priorities for voters in national elections as to be negligible; secondly, for the reasons that I shall expand upon later, elections of MEPs are met with even more apathy than National elections and are therefore usually hijacked by the lunatic fringe or voted on along national party lines. Obviously there are parts of Europe where the two above statements are not so accurate, but by and large (and most certainly in the UK) they hold sway.

The upshot of this is that the only people who might have access to the general public opinion are given little of it except by the most vocal Europhiles or Europhobes. This is not a balanced picture, and besides it only really affects the MEPs in any meaningful sense. So the people with the power to change things – the commissioners and their armies of bureaucrats – are so far removed from the people of Europe as to have no idea what they might or might not want, so they dream up any old nonsense that might get them onto the world stage and invited to more pointless conferences and then wave it in front of the Parliament who rubber stamp it, and the national governments, who water it down to a point where it is meaningless, before looking for some other flimsy idea to legislate over. The constitution was a failure because it was a pile of crap that no one wanted and even fewer people cared about. If only someone would have the balls to come up with a proper constitution for a proper EU someone might take enough of an interest to vote for it.

Unfortunately this is unlikely because the national governments prefer the unwieldy and crumblig structure that the Lisbon Treaty will stick another plaster over. We need some way to take the lead, take the power away from the national governements and the Comission and give it back to the people of Europe. Doing this would cause massive consternation amongst the national governments and the entrenched power systems of the EU (not to mention the right-wing media), but then real change has to be resisted somewhere.