Original Posting: 02 October 2004 Friday 2300 hrs Singapore
Re-posted from here (http://www.iht.com/articles/75733.html)
A constitution for Europe
William Pfaff IHT
Monday, November 4, 2002
'An acceptable word'
PARIS Until 1948, Europe was geography. It has since been a number of things, without clearly identifying what it really wants to become.
First it was divided into an East and a West. The western governments formed a military alignment in 1948, professed in 1949 the aim of unification and became in 1951 an economic "community" of six countries. This eventually turned into a single market, a currency zone of 12 members and a "union" of 15.The union was governed by a multiplication of separate treaties, increasingly illegible to layman or politician. With Eastern and Western Europe reunited since 1989, Europe now intends to become a group with 25 members. But members of what? A European "convention" was established less than a year ago and placed under the presidency of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to draft a constitution for Europe, to be presented next spring in anticipation of EU expansion. The convention has now offered the bones of a constitution that would consolidate and replace five decades of treaties and establish what exactly an expanded Europe is to become in the future.This text is only the first step, but it will undoubtedly have considerable influence on the final constitution because of its intellectual clarity, and because of the political abilities and exceptional intelligence of Giscard, a former French president, who with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany launched European monetary integration in the 1970s.Giscard's intelligence has not always proved a political asset, and his display of superior abilities contributed to the popular vote against him in 1981, when he lost the presidency to François Mitterrand. The European constitutional convention now has provided him with an opportunity to become again a maker of modern Europe.His skeleton for the constitution says that Europe should be given a legal personality. Whatever "Europe" is today - economic community, political association, political alliance, quasi-federation, single market, trading zone - it would in the proposed constitution become a juridical entity. To get in touch with Europe, Washington and the world would at last have one number to call.There might be a president who answers. Giscard suggests the possibility of a president for the European Council, to take the place of the rotating national presidencies.The text specifically recommends a new status for the high representative of Europe for foreign policy and European security. This presumes that Europe can have a common foreign policy - a disputed point, but one given a positive response by recent European diplomacy.Despite Tony Blair's attachment to American leadership, the Europeans generally were rallied to defend the principle that international law confers on the United Nations Security Council, not the White House, the right to decide when a nation can be attacked in support of world legality. This position found majority support - until now, at least - in the Security Council, meaning that if the United States did unilaterally go to war against Iraq, as it has threatened, it would do so in (costly) quasi-isolation.Giscard's skeleton text suggests a Congress of the Peoples of Europe, in which European Parliament deputies and members of the national parliaments would sit together. Spain's foreign minister, Ana Palacio, a member of the convention, observes that giving Europe a legal personality would greatly influence Europeans' own perception of Europe.She says Giscard "has made 'constitution' an acceptable word." A year ago that was a forbidden word, she adds, "associated with an extremist, federalist view." She says that "until now, we've associated Europe with a market," but "now people will associate it with a constitution." Giscard's constitutional proposal has philosophical elegance and lucidity, in the French fashion, but lacks the eloquence and profundity of the American constitution, which benefited from the freshness of the 18th century Enlightenment's refoundation of Western political thought, as well as from an elegance in the employment of language that we have lost.Giscard himself acknowledges this when he says that the initial section of Europe's constitution must "be incisive and powerful," and must also possess "a certain lyricism." It will lay down the foundation and structure the functioning of Europe. "It must be clear and readable to everyone."His document offends some European conservatives and nationalists (as well as the American right) because of his emphasis on "solidarity" among the Europeans, and his document's proposal of dual national and European citizenship, with general eligibility of all Europeans to vote in European and municipal elections in whatever country they are in.Giscard's text also provides for states to quit Europe, if they so decide, a provision hitherto absent, which should please Euroskeptics on both sides of the Atlantic. International Herald Tribune Tribune Media Services International