So, we are to have a referendum on the EU Constitution. This is, I think, a good moment to inflict on my half-dozen readers my views on this seminal document.
For those who haven't looked at the thing, it's about 70,000 words long (approximately twice the length of Animal Farm, and ten times the length of the United States constitution, to pick two random examples); on A4 paper, it weighs in at 265 pages, though that is only achieved by halving the line spacing after the first 46 pages. It contains such gems of the writer's art as,
The Member States shall facilitate the achievement of the Union's tasks and refrain from any measure which could jeopardise the attainment of the objectives set out in the Constitution.
Rights recognised by this Charter for which provision is made in other Parts of the Constitution shall be exercised under the conditions and within the limits defined by these relevant Parts. Insofar as this Charter contains rights which correspond to rights guaranteed by the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the meaning and scope of those rights shall be the same as those laid down by the said Convention.
The Council of Ministers, on a proposal from the Union Minister for Foreign Affairs or the Commission, shall adopt a European decision suspending application of an agreement and establishing the positions to be adopted on the Union's behalf in a body set up by an agreement, when that body is called upon to adopt acts having legal effects, with the exception of acts supplementing or amending the institutional framework of the agreement.
Now, readers of The Book of Heroic Failures will be familiar with even less comprehensible Ground Nuts Act, which contained the following clarifying provision:
In the Nuts (unground), other than ground nuts Order, the expression nuts shall have reference to such nuts, other than ground nuts, as would but for this amending Order not qualify as nuts (unground) (other than ground nuts) by reason of their being nuts (unground).
-- but this is not to say that new legislation need approach the same levels of obscurity. Some recent attempts are of admirable simplicity:
1. (1) Any person who knowingly causes a nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for life.
and it's not clear why the Constitution shouldn't fall into this category.
(As an aside, the passing of the Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition and Inspections) Act 1998, from which that last example is drawn, occasioned one of the best letters to the Times I can remember reading; it ran -- paraphrasing, as their archive is not on the web -- ``Am I seriously to understand that, had I caused a nuclear explosion prior to the passing of this Act, I would not have been breaking the law?'' This comes in just behind another relating to the innovation of `numeracy hours' in primary schools, which prompted a correspondent to inquire, ``My son's school has now instituted a Numeracy Hour which, according to the timetable, is to last 45 minutes. Is all hope now lost?'' -- to which the answer is, I think, `yes'. I can't bear to read the Times any more, but perhaps I should relax this rule in relation to the letters page....)
Now, the European Union has in its fifty-odd-year history been immensely successful and effective at fulfilling its basic purpose -- which is, roughly, to stop the French and the Germans from having another war. On this basis it gets my unqualified support. All the other stuff -- the legions of officials and attendant legions of enriching scams, the subsidies to agriculture, the inflexible monetary policy and the World's Biggest Constitution -- is just icing on the cake.
The European Union is also, of course, turning the European Union into a free-trade area (well, if you ignore the subsidies, anyway), which is a jolly good idea and probably helps it to implement its first aim -- though it's not really clear why all the apparatus of the Commission, Parliament and so forth is necessary for this. (As an aside, I would love somebody to explain to me why uniformity of regulation is necessary for free trade. Modern trade policy seems to assume that this is true, but nobody explains why; it's not at all obvious to me why, for instance, Australia needs to incorporate bonkers American IP policy into its local laws in order for there to be free trade between Australia and the United States.)
Anyway, if someone can convince me that an incomprehensible 70,000-word Constitution is necessary to keep Europe at peace and prosperous, I'll vote for the bloody thing. Otherwise, I'm against it until they can cut it down to a reasonable length. Two sides of A4 would be about right.
Update: Michael Howard has done a silly thing: he has pledged that, if the result of the referendum is a `no' vote, the Conservative Party will never sign up to any European Constitution. This means that people like me who think that this Constitution is bloody awful, but that a future attempt at a European Constitution (or Constitutional Treaty or whatever) could be an improvement over the status quo, might be discouraged from voting `no' in the upcoming referendum. Now, my view is very likely a minority one, but is Howard really saying that the Conservatives would oppose a hypothetical future treaty which restricted the power of the center and restored authority to the member states of the EU, simply because it would establish a new Constitution for the Union?
Comments
Posted by Anthony, Monday, 19 April 2004 15:12 (link):
The theory is that uniformity of regulation is necessary in order to stop non-tariff barriers - protectionism by other means.
For example, in a free trade area France is forced to drop all tariff barriers on, for example, books. France does so, but then institutes new regulations stating that all books sold in France must be written on standard sized paper, 4 millimetres shy of the size normally used by most other countries' printers. French publishers' main market is obviously France, so they change their presses to work with the sizes mandated by the French authorities. For an Irish printer, however, France makes up only a small proportion of their exports and it does not make sense for them to retool to meet the French regulations. Hence France has effectively put up a non-tariff barrier against Irish imports.
That's the theory, of course, in practice specific decisions don't always seem to make quite so much sense.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 19 April 2004 16:57 (link):
Hmm. OK so far as it goes, but then the implication is either that no country can have any public policy in markets in tradeable goods, or that a line must be drawn about what's an issue of public policy and what's a `non-tariff barrier'. I see no evidence that the latter is happening; a recent example is the business of the EU wanting to alter the rules for import of tobacco and alcoholic drinks into the UK. Now, whatever you might think about the way that those products are taxed in this country, it seems pretty hard to argue that there isn't a legitimate public policy concern over the use of alcohol and tobacco.
And in other cases the regulations which are being harmonised often can't reasonably be characterised as preventing the establishment of `non-tariff barriers'. For instance, in the intellectual property case the uniform regulations upon which free trade agreements (such as the US/Australia and US/Singapore ones) are contingent are that additional laws are imposed (relating to legal protection for `copy protection' technology).
Now, if the regulations weren't implemented in (say) Australia, US publishers could decide whether they were going to sell their products in Australia and accept the risk of their products being pirated in the Australian market. (They would, of course, for three reasons: firstly, copy protection doesn't really work; secondly, some sales is better than no sales; and thirdly, the products would be pirated in Australia anyway. But this is tangential to the issue.) Unlike in your paper sizes example, this doesn't give local producers any advantage in the Australian market -- they're governed by exactly the same restrictions as the US products are -- and it doesn't give the Australian producers any advantage in the US market, for the same reason. So it can't reasonably be characterised as a `non-tariff barrier'. And yet a lot of effort is being spent on harmonising law in the IP field, under the pretext of enabling free trade.
It is all Most Odd....
Posted by Mike, Monday, 19 April 2004 15:21 (link):
Your aside about numeracy reminds me of a comment by Paul Merton on HIGNFY a while back, in reply to a complaint that a high proportion of youngsters were innumerate:
"Yes, but they don't count"
Posted by James Graham, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 12:11 (link):
The copy I have here in front of me is less than A5 in size and consists of 167 pages. 40 of those pages simply list the people involved in drafting it. 50 of those pages is the Charter of Fundamental Rights. I don't believe that 70 pages for a constitution is unreasonable, and as it supercedes all the previous treaties, it is actually a huge reduction in terms of paperwork.
If you vote "no" in the upcoming referendum, you are voting for the status quo. That means Rome, the single european act, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice... and those are just the ones off the top of my head. I thought you hated needless bureaucracy?
As for the "legions of officials", stop me if you've heard this before, but the EU in total employs fewer people than Hampshire County Council. Indeed, local government is rife with corruption scandals.
None of that is to say that it is perfect, but ultimately it is in our interest to have a detailed process which determines how laws get made at an EU level. The alternative would be a secret stitch up between the governments of each Member State. By contrast, the EU gives us much greater say. The constitution gives us more say still.
Posted by Matthew Turner, Tuesday, 20 April 2004 17:04 (link):
I haven't really taken much notice of the debate so far, or the intricacies of the constitution, but I can guarantee that after an 8-week referendum campaign from the usual suspects of the "No" lobby, frothing at the mouth about bananas and the Queen, I'll vote "yes".
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Wednesday, 21 April 2004 00:37 (link):
70 pages is a hell of a lot, especially for a basic law which ought to be comprehensible -- and memorable -- to everyone who lives in the European Union. The fact that it's smaller than the current treaties isn't that much of a recommendation, and since the new Constitution may never be renegotiated, we should try very hard to get it right first time.
No. Realistically, I am voting for the Constitutional Convention, or some successor body, to go off and have another go at it. Since it is widely accepted that the status quo will become hopelessly unwieldy after the expansion of the Union, some new effort will be needed. Perhaps it is true that `the best is the enemy of the good-enough'; in any case, that's not a good enough reason to vote for this thing.
... as the old joke goes,
In fact, Hampshire County Council employs the equivalent of 21,800 full-time employees; the European Commission alone employs about 24,000; the various other institutions employ still more.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm a very strong supporter of the EU, for the reasons I give in my original article (basically, that I like living in a Europe which is at peace, more-or-less). But it ought to be able to do a lot better than this constitution.
Posted by James Graham, Thursday, 22 April 2004 03:20 (link):
"Realistically, I am voting for the Constitutional Convention, or some successor body, to go off and have another go at it."
Tosh. A vote for no is a vote for the status quo. You can't second guess what would happen next - they could come up with a second draft you'd like even less! They might well stick with Nice for a bit and see what happens.
You don't know what would happen, and plenty of other no voters will be claiming that it means something else. Some will claim it means we should leave the EU. Howard has said he will interpret it to mean that we have rejected the very concept of a constitution (I suspect if they came back with a second draft in which the word "constitution" had been deleted and nothing else, he'd declare that to be a phenomenal victory, but there you go). You might not like X in it, someone else might not like Y. A "no" vote would be a collective shoulder shrug, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence for what will happen next.
For the record though, yes, I'd have preferred it to be a few pages long as well. I just don't think we have the luxury to split hairs at this stage.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Thursday, 22 April 2004 09:03 (link):
True, this is a little premature, given that we don't even know the form of the referendum question yet! That said, given the row over whether a `no' vote might be followed by another attempt to get a referendum to approve the thing (as in Ireland the last time round), it might be that a vote for no ends up being a vote for the bloody thing anyway. But since there seems to be a consensus that the Nice apparatus can't work once the new members have joined the Union, I think that, should the current treaty founder, a new one will have to be negotiated.
And the status quo isn't that bad. In particular, nobody believes that it's a perfect or long-term settlement, which appears to be the fiction behind the proposed Constitution. It will be very difficult to amend a Constitution.
Posted by John Murphy, Friday, 30 April 2004 20:26 (link):
The whole idea that the EU provides peace in Europe is one of my favourite EU myths. Its a specious arguement like Lisas to her father in the Simpsons. "This rock keeps tigers away" "Its just a rock" "But I don`t see any tigers around here do you?"
I don`t even think that europhiles beleive this myth its just to get support from disinterested voters just like when eurosceptics harp on about nationalism. The fact is the EU hasn`t done anything for peace. The thing that has kept us all from each others throats is that were all liberal democracies now (not to mention rich) and no liberal democracy has ever invaded another. This idea that the EU is a model of peace and harmony is rubbish. Because of it countires are more likely to be argueing with each other about its policy. And any way there all only using it for their own self interest.
I hate this idea that Germany is an evil country and that if we don`t restrain it it`ll turn evil again. Germans arent evil the wars were just a product of circumstances. The first world war was just back when we were always fighting each other anyway and the second was a product of germany losing the first one being treated quite unfairly and then experiencing the brunt of the worst deppression the world has ever seen.
If they EU has made us richer which I doubt then it will have made the place a bit more stable but the reality is that it is more likely to be a danger to peace as it is a danger to democracy within its all powerful undemocratic commision and its parliament with seemingly thousands of political parties and only advisory powers.
A BBC reporter said the other day that the countries joining tommorow hoped to see the same economic growth that Spain did after joining the EU in 1975 after the collapse of its facist regime. Now really what is going to make more difference to a country's world trade and economy the joining and trading block (the EU) or the collapse of a dictatorial facist regime and the growth of democracy
Posted by Roy Badami, Monday, 31 May 2004 19:43 (link):
This means that people like me who think that this Constitution is bloody awful, but that a future attempt at a European Constitution (or Constitutional Treaty or whatever) could be an improvement over the status quo, might be discouraged from voting `no' in the upcoming referendum.
Or alternatively you might simply be discouraged from voting Tory in any future general election :-)
-roy
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