It looks as if it’s going to be defeated in France.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/05/25/france.no.ap/
danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: One week left to say "<i>Oui</i>"
And the Dutch also appear relatively non-plussed with the idea of signing on.
Latest news from around the world | The Guardian
What do the continental Europeans and Brits think of this (and Makkun, with is feet in both camps… =-) )?
Here’s a commentary by Brit ex-pat and former UPI head John O’Sullivan that looks at it from the U.S. perspective:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul24.html
No EU constitution, no problem for U.S.
May 24, 2005
BY JOHN O’SULLIVAN
ROTTERDAM, Holland – With almost the whole of Europe fixated on the result of next Sunday’s French referendum on the European constitution, the Dutch are feeling distinctly neglected. Their referendum vote takes place only a few days after France’s. But the European bureaucrats and media all treat the French vote as crucial – it will supposedly either save or scupper the Euro-constitution – and all other national votes as expendable.
According to the law in the EU’s founding treaties, the proposed constitution cannot go into effect if any nation rejects it. But the conventional wisdom is that there are national gradations of power in this regard:
First level: If France, a founding member of the EU and one of Europe’s “Big Three,” rejects the constitution by a clear margin, then the constitution is finished.
Second level: If Britain, one of Europe’s “Big Three” but not a founding EU member, votes against it, then there would have to be renegotiations to make the treaty more palatable to the British electorate.
Third level: If Holland, a founding member but one of Europe’s smaller nations, votes against it, then the Dutch will have to keep voting until they get it right – as in the past the Irish and Danes were forced to eat their votes.
Not unreasonably, the Dutch tend to resent the EU establishment’s apparent contempt for both the law and the rights of small nations. As a result, they are likely to vote against the constitution in their referendum – perhaps by a margin as high as 2-1.
If that happens, it would lead to some interesting complications. It would be very difficult for Brussels to ask the Dutch to vote again if their first vote had been so decisive. Too much bullying of the Dutch would also have a negative effect on the British referendum likely to be held next year. Nations such as Germany that have failed to put the Euro-constitution to a popular vote would be restrained by embarrassment from berating the Dutch for holding a vote and getting it wrong.
All in all, the conventional wisdom could be wrong: A decisive Dutch “no” might halt the constitution in its tracks even if the French narrowly vote “yes” on May 29. In that event, the entire constitutional process would have either to be abandoned or started again from scratch.
The conventional wisdom (again) suggests that in these circumstances the European status quo would essentially be unchanged. That would certainly be true at first – after all, a rejection of the constitution means that the existing treaties would continue to define the relations between Brussels and member-states.
But the European governments embarked on the constitutional process precisely because they found the existing arrangements too cumbersome. Nor would Germany and France be willing to return permanently to the earlier voting arrangements under the Nice Treaty which, in their view, gave too much power to Poland, Spain and the smaller member-states. So a new constitutional process is likely to be adopted after a pause for reflection.
The snag here is that different nations have doubts about the constitution now under consideration on exactly opposite grounds.
The French “no” voters are nervous about it because they believe it threatens to impose an Anglo-American “neo-liberalism” (i.e., free markets and free trade) on a protected and centralized French economy. They fear that Brussels would take away their 35-hour week, long lunches and short shop opening hours.
The British Euro-skeptics, on the other hand, fear that the constitution will give the Brussels bureaucracy greater powers to impose regulations and restrictions a la francaise on their more flexible and efficient labor market. The British government is at present resisting an EU directive that would remove the right of workers to do overtime work up to 48 hours even if they request it.
Both cannot be right – and they’re not. What the French “no” voters object to in the constitution is its high-minded, idealistic rhetoric about free trade – which has been in every EU treaty since the treaty of Rome – rather than the practical fine print that transfers so many powers to their fellow-regulators in Brussels. Because the French government realizes this as clearly as British Euro-skeptics, it is fighting vigorously for a “yes” result.
In the event of a “no” vote and the start of major new constitutional rethinking, however, all these and other questions would be open for discussion: Should the EU concentrate more powers in Brussels or surrender some existing powers to its member-states? Should the EU become a unitary or federal state with a common foreign policy or develop into a looser free trade area with fewer elements of political integration? Should the EU seek to become a superpower rival of the United States or to remain a close and loyal ally? And so on.
All of these are matters of great importance to the United States. And a debate on them now would be taking place at a time when France and Germany no longer dominate the European debate and when America’s friends exercise greater influence.
France is plainly divided over its European destiny. Germany, now in the midst of a political crisis, may shortly have a new government friendlier to the United States. And the new democracies that like the Brits and the Dutch favor a close Euro-American friendship are full EU members that have already flexed their muscles over EU policy during the Ukraine crisis.
If the constitution is rejected, as now looks possible, there will be a brief opportunity for the United States to influence the development of the EU in ways favorable to itself. We must not let this opportunity slip, let alone destroy it by seeking to support a constitution our strongest European friends oppose.
Steyn has had some good articles on this.
What I find interesting is the air of inevitability these EU technocrats have…as if an unelected, unresponsive legislative body is more democratic that the current polititcal systems in each country? How long is the constitution? 350 pages or something?
I hope it fails.
I downloaded the EU constitution, it was too much to read unlike the American constitution. I don’t trust that.
The American founding fathers could be quite eloquent when they put pen to paper, but they kept things brief and to the point.
I think the Europeans should consider the importance of state’s rights.
Some countries like England and France have long histories of dealing with other countries and cultures that some of the other member states don’t share. There are grudges out there that are not going to go away by becoming part of a bigger superstate. Subordinating their foreign and defense policy to the EU in the hope that bygones will be bygones is naive and potentially suicidal.
Economically it’s a mess. Some of Europes econmies can not compete in the world market. Much has changed in the last 30 years in terms of labor markets. Some refuse to aknowledge this and want to hamstring the entire community with work rules that don’t take into account the new realities.
Too much power concentrated into too few hands is not going to be good for freedom.
THis op-ed from WSJ Europe looks at this from the free-trade/economic perspective:
French Furies
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
May 26, 2005
PARIS – A few blocks from the Bastille, a monument to rabble-rousers of other eras, Georges Sarre called his “militants” to the barricades the other day. Urging a non to the European Union’s proposed constitution in Sunday’s referendum, he said: “Fight for democracy, fight for the Republic and fight for social justice!” The few dozen people in the school hall, mostly gray-haired like him, responded with tepid applause.
Mr. Sarre, who is 69, held prominent jobs in Socialist governments of the 1980s before withdrawing into relative obscurity, becoming the mayor of the 11th arrondissement of Paris. He’s the No. 2 in Mouvement R?pulicain et Citoyen, a Socialist splinter party, which mustered 1% in the last parliamentary elections in 2002. But in this spring of Gallic discontent, the cranks and dinosaurs of the French political scene have won a new lease on life.
The “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe” – a tedious 475 pages in four parts, 36 protocols and two annexes – aroused barely any interest, much less passion, earlier in the year. Now, it’s the cause of a brewing political crisis in Europe. The Continent’s establishment was stunned by the sudden swing – 24 points in a mere two weeks in March – against the constitution in France. The polls now give the no’s a four-percentage-point lead.
This EU project was conceived in 2001, debated and written by a Philadelphia-style Convention – headed by a former French president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, no less – and signed off on by the EU’s leaders last year. But unlike James Madison & Co., Europe’s founders failed to produce a crisp or durable-looking charter. The treaty – constitution is really a misnomer – does “tidy up” (in Tony Blair’s words) the EU’s previous treaties, making it easier to run the bloc. Some innovations, like a “foreign minister” and fewer national vetoes, mark a step toward closer integration, but any claim that in this form it gives birth to a “European super-state” is pure fancy. As each member state must ratify the thing, France’s no would render all this discussion moot.
The demise of the constitution – if not France, then Britain, Holland and Poland look poised to reject it – would be a black eye for the EU’s leaders and a precursor to months of political uncertainty. Collapse, or a split between the pro-market, pro-U.S. members and “social Europeans” like the French who want to wall themselves off from the world, are possible outcomes. But the smart money would be on more of the same. The bloc managed to give birth to a single currency and grew from six to 25 members without any constitution, all the while honing a talent for the type of creatively messy solution that may be called for after Sunday.
And yet despite the unprecedented interest in the workings of that Brussels institution – people can be caught reading the treaty on the Paris metro – the campaign in France, as elsewhere, isn’t about the constitution or the future of the EU.
Whether the no’s win or not, the recent months here are proof that economic populism is back in the European mainstream. Liberal ideas are taboo, and anyone who favors them is on the defensive. The old European left, not chastened by the collapse of the Berlin wall, sets the terms of debate in a nation nominally led by a right-wing government.
In this, France is in crowded company among the recession-plagued large economies of Europe: anti-capitalist feeling is growing in Germany, where the head of the nation’s ruling party recently likened foreign investors to a plague of “locusts,” and reforms are stalled in Italy.
These Old European ailments are nothing new. But the ripples from French campaign are new and are already being felt at the EU level. Britain and Ireland – physically unattached to the Continent – along with the former Soviet-bloc states now in the EU are fighting to open up Europe. These countries have tasted the fruits of liberalization, and want to push the EU in that direction.
The surprising success in France of a campaign against the constitution with anti-globalization overtones and no charismatic leader or national media support will make it harder. If President Jacques Chirac, who panders to the left more than any European socialist has in office, can be humbled so easily, so can others. The French campaign claimed a victim in the form of the EU’s proposal to liberalize the market in services throughout the bloc, which until it was shelved in March would have marked a big, belated step toward realizing the dream of a truly single European market.
How did the European Union’s future come to be imperiled by the country that more than any other claims paternity for the entire five-decade-old venture? The 11th arrondissement, the birthplace of the French Revolution, is a good place to find answers. The neighborhood, off the tourist trails of Paris, is today home to 30-something bourgeois-bohemians (“les bobos”), blue-collar workers and a large Muslim and black African community – a cross-section of middle-class France, where hip bars on Rue Oberkampf abut one-room mosques.
Here, the nons built support quietly, from the bottom up, unnoticed by the mainstream parties. Long before the referendum seemed to be on the government’s mind, colorful posters went up calling for a rejection of a constitution that no one was talking about. Just the word “no” hit a nerve in a nation seemingly in permanent crisis, political or economic, culminating in the opposition’s best known slogan, “The ‘no’ of hope.”
From the start, the campaigners condemned, in no particular order, globalization, the slaying of “social” Europe modeled on France by the Anglo-Saxon free marketers, the country’s aloof ruling class and, of course, America. The variety came in the form of the parties whose various acronyms appeared on the pamphlets and posters in the neighborhood: several splinter French communist groups, the far-right National Front, the anti-globalization Attac, the nationalist leftists of Mr. Sarre’s MRC, all fringe parties of both extremes sharing a single tent once again. This cocktail may bring the establishment to its knees.
“They have the power, but they don’t represent the people,” Mr. Sarre said in his mayor’s office. Most Frenchmen would be hard pressed to name their representative in parliament, but they know their town officials. In the 11th, Mr. Sarre became a face of the no’s. Antigovernment banners went up over the main boulevards. He endorsed local groups with names such as the “appeal of 250” – literally, the number of supporters it claimed.
Anti-elitism, frustration with French democracy – the Fifth Republic probably could use an update to a Sixth to make leaders more directly accountable – and widespread antipathy toward incumbents and especially Mr. Chirac fueled this grassroots uprising – a bit ? la 1968, however much the '68ers might dislike the parallel. Above all the movement appealed to national anger, of which there’s plenty.
Once world-class schools and hospitals are overcrowded and shoddy. Growth is under 1% and unemployment broke through the 10% ceiling this year. A quarter of the labor force works for the state; another 6 million, or a tenth of all Frenchmen, are on welfare. Their country is in decline, “falling,” as the title of a recent best-seller put it. To a people reared to believe in the superiority of their way of doing everything, these are troubling times.
So along comes something – the EU constitution – that’s a convenient punching bag to vent anxiety about the modern world. The EU represents capitalism, globalization, America; who knew! “The constitution condemns us to 50 years of liberalism – it condemns us to hell,” said Bernard Loche, a public television journalist who organized a “no” committee, told a rally that at the House of Metallurgists in the 11th.
Britain’s euroskeptics, of course, say exactly the opposite – that the EU is a Trojan horse for socialism. But at heart their message is the same: The EU is one of the forces buffeting their countries which the old nation-state can’t control. Or as Mr. Sarre’s MRC put it in a pamphlet: “From La Paz to Seoul, from Reykjavik to Bamako, from Paris to Warsaw, everywhere liberal globalization extends its enormous tentacles.”
Not all of France lives in denial of the modern world. Competitive private multinationals and other businesses produce the jobs and taxes that keep the welfare state afloat, if barely. The oui’s could yet form the majority Sunday, but does it matter? The “no” camp has captured the public imagination and given shape to the politics of today and probably tomorrow in Europe. No matter that they don’t put forth alternative policies or a realistic world view; that’s not the point. Like other Western Europeans, the French want an escape. In a recent front-page cartoon in Le Monde, a grumpy Frenchman stands plastered with “Non” stickers and holding a “Non” poster. “Oui ? l’Europe Sociale et Fran?aise!” he says. Yes, if only the whole world were socialist and French.
Mr. Kaminski is deputy editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
BostonBarrister:
I want to know what our exit strategy is for Europe. Fifty+ years now. I think we had better impeach George Bush and his dad over this, and exile W’s dog.
Pull out now!
Rush D. Holt, Sr. and Gerald P. Nye in '08!
Also, should we take a page out of the European playbook and come in and take pity on them and offer condescending advice on how to do this? (Is anyone else as irritated by the Germans and French who talk about their “old and wise” government when compared to the “brash and young” US nation? Uhhhh… 1946?) )
This is a bit rambling, biased, ill-informed and no doubt founded on false information, (but I read it it newsweek, so it must be true) j/k
It’s funny, but I have absolutely no idea what the EU constitution will entail - largely because we’ve been given no information on it.
The EU is one of those strange things in Europe, distrusted and despised by the masses, yet loved by those in power (as a sweeping generalisation). As far as I see the EU, the idea of it makes sense - by relying on each other economically, we don’t need to be propped up by the US (bearing in mind that most of Europe was pretty much bankrupt after WW2).
BUT, the reality of the EU seems to be that a largely undemocratic body of people, who aren’t really responsible or answerable to any of the people they are ruling, keep introducing rules that most people find petty and ridiculous.
One of the most annoying grievances we have in the UK is that we seem to contribute more money to the pot than we ever get out of it, with most of the funds seemingly used to enable French farmers enjoy a high standard of living through enourmous subsidies.
The other annoyance we have is the “European Court of Human Rights”, which exists solely to overturn legal decisions made in Britain by our elected government. (Or so it would seem).
Now, most of what I have written is just my opinion - and largely because no-one has ever told me of any of the positive sides to membership of the EU, so as far as signing a constitution goes, I would be reluctant to say yes.
Joe, if the French vote against it, that alone should move you a couple of points towards voting FOR it.
I want our elected representatives to invite the UK into NAFTA. I love the Brits.
Here are a couple links to some good analyses of the results of the “non” vote:
http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004588.html
Here’s some exit-polling data on why the French voted “non”:
http://www.ipsos.fr/CanalIpsos/poll/8074.asp
[NOTE: It’s in French, but this handy-dandy translator will adjust it to English for you if you enter the URL above: http://babelfish.altavista.com/ ]
A couple interesting points:
The only employment category that supported the constitution were Professions lib?rales, cadres sup?rieurs – i.e., the French elite.
40% of the “non” vote thought the constitution was too economically liberal
Finally, this is a good overview from George Will:
Europe At the Precipice
By George F. Will
Sunday, May 29, 2005; Page B07
The European Union, which has a flag no one salutes and an anthem no one knows, now seeks ratification of a constitution few have read. Surely only its authors have read its turgid earnestness without laughing, which is one reason why the European project is foundering. Today in France, and Wednesday in the Netherlands, Europe’s elites – political, commercial and media – may learn the limits of their ability to impose their political fetishes on restive and rarely consulted publics.
The European project is the transformation of “Europe” from a geographic into a political denotation. This requires the steady drainage of sovereignty from national parliaments and the “harmonization” of most economic and social policies. But if any of the 25 E.U. member nations reject the proposed constitution – 11 have ratified it or are in the process of doing so – it shall not come into effect. And if French voters in today’s referendum reject it, Dutch voters will be even more likely to do so in their nation’s first referendum in 200 years.
France and the Netherlands are a third of the original six members of the European Union’s precursor, the European Economic Community. The most important treaty in the transformation of a Europe of states into a state of Europe was signed in 1992 in the Dutch city after which it is named – Maastricht. The proposed constitution, which is 10 times longer than the U.S. Constitution, was written by a convention led by a former French president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing.
So why are these two nations being balky? Partly because, unusually, they are allowed to be. The European project has come this far largely by bypassing democracy.
Many French voters will use today’s referendum to vent grievances against Jacques Chirac, who has been in power for 10 years, which would be excessive even if he were not overbearing. Some French factions, their normal obstreperousness leavened by paranoia, think the constitution is a conspiracy to use “ultraliberalism” – free markets – to destroy their “social model.” That is the suffocating web of labor laws and other statism that gives France double-digit unemployment – a staggering 22 percent of those under age 25.
Furthermore, with a Muslim presence in France of 8 percent and rising, there is a backlash against Chirac’s championing of E.U. membership for Turkey, which would be, by the time it joined, by far the most populous E.U. country. Admission of Turkey would further reduce – more than did last year’s admission of 10 nations, eight in Eastern Europe – the European Union’s output per person, which according to one study already ranks below that of 46 American states.
The 16 million Dutch, the largest per-capita net contributors to the European Union, live uneasily with a growing population of Muslim immigrants. The Dutch immigration minister says that “we have about 700,000 people who have been here for years but who don’t speak the language or have a clue about our most basic rules and values.” Many Dutch regard the proposed constitution as a device for sweeping their little nation into a large, meddlesome entity of 450 million people, with consequent dilution of self-determination.
The proposed constitution has 448 articles – 441 more than the U.S. Constitution. It is a jumble of pieties, giving canonical status to sentiments such as “the physical and moral integrity of sportsmen and sportswomen” should be protected. It establishes, among many other rights, a right to “social and housing assistance” sufficient for a “decent existence.” Presumably, supranational courts and bureaucracies will define and enforce those rights, as well as the right of children to “express their views fully.” And it stipulates that “preventive action should be taken” to protect the e nvironment.
The constitution says member states can “exercise their competence” only where the European Union does not exercise its. But the constitution gives E.U. institutions jurisdiction over foreign affairs, defense, immigration, trade, energy, agriculture, fishing and much more. Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, is scurrying crabwise away from his vow to hold a referendum on the constitution even if France rejects it. But, then, how could any serious prime minister countenance a constitution that renders his office a nullity?
T.S. Eliot, a better poet than philosopher, wrote: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
Nonsense. If the French and Dutch reject the constitution, they will do so for myriad reasons, some of them foolish. But whatever the reasons, the result will be salutary because the constitution would accelerate the leeching away of each nation’s sovereignty.
Sovereignty is a predicate of self-government. The deeply retrograde constitution would reverse five centuries of struggle to give representative national parliaments control over public finance and governance generally.