eurealist.co.uk

EU constitution is dead, says Dutch minister,

Federalist hopes of reviving the draft European Union constitution were snuffed out yesterday when the Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, said the treaty was “dead”.

He swept away months of euphemisms and half-truths, as European leaders struggled to avoid being the first to declare an end to the constitutional project, after its rejection in referendums by French and Dutch voters.

Austria, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency for the next six months, has pledged to work on reviving the constitution.

Vienna said it would take soundings from the other 24 EU nations on how to “choreograph” its revival, in preparation for a June summit ending a year-long “pause for reflection”.

However, when Ursula Plassnik, the Austrian foreign minister, flew to The Hague to sound out the Dutch, Mr Bot poured cold water on the initiative.
Mr Bot, standing beside Mrs Plassnik, said: “We have discussed the constitution, which for the Netherlands is dead.”

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said: “Since the best that can be said about the draft constitutional treaty is that is in limbo, which is somewhere between Heaven and Hell, it is difficult to argue that it is not dead.”

One unnamed EU diplomat said: “It is hard to see any incoming French or Dutch government, in 2007, choosing to swallow the poison pill that is another referendum on the constitution, which they could easily lose.”

This is the headline news on Thursday but by Saturday we have a totally different story and one moreover which contains the answer to the federalists problems of getting each country to ratify the Constitution individually.

MEPs will next week debate a report that is aimed at salvaging the EU constitution, and forming a clear decision byt the end of 2007 on how its core parts should be ratified despite last year’s “no” votes in France and the Netherlands.

The two co-rapporteurs of the European Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee, the UK liberal Andrew Duff and the Austrian Green Johannes Voggenhuber, on Friday (13 January) joined the choir of EU leaders expressing their opinion over the fate of the text since the beginning of this year.

The MEPs described the interventions so far as “simplistic” and presented instead a report setting out a specific roadmap for the resuscitation of the constitution in a revised form.

The Duff-Voggenhuber report, on which the parliament will vote on Thursday, proposes to intensify the so-called period of reflection on the constitution, agreed by EU leaders after French and Dutch voters rejected the text in referendums last year.

According to the plan, the European Parliament will this year and next year together with national parliaments promote a series of parliamentary forums, which the MEPs hope will be echoed by a series of national debates.

The reflection period should then be “brought to an end in the second half of 2007 with a clear decision how to proceed with the constitution”.

And the kicker is…………….
After negotiations on improvements in 2008, a revised text should be put to European citizens in an EU-wide consultative referendum on the same day as the European elections in 2009.

There we have the EU`s answer to the democratic choice of the people, an EU wide Referendum will make it impossible for an individual state to veto the constitution.

Thus at a stroke undermining and reversing the French and Dutch votes and also violating the agreements made in all the previous treaties that each state would have a clear veto on any changes to the treaties.

I would suggest that as the EU Parliament wish to now unilaterally remove the power of the individual state to oppose treaty change, and as this is such an unequivocal contravention of the agreement undertaken by each state in agreeing to the original treaties, that those treaties have been broken.

The importance of this move by the EU Parliament cannot be overstated.

The Constitution sets the EU up as an independent actor, until then it is the creature of the States, it acts for the states, thus each state is still sovereign and has the right to decide or not whether it wishes to change its treaties, if it does not then no other agency can force it to do so. It was under this agreement that the EU gained power in the first place, it was this understanding that allowed each and every government to sell each treaty to their respective parliaments and or citizens.

In exactly this way we were told in 1975 that “all nine (then) member countries also agree that any changes or additions to the “Market Treaties” must be acceptable to their own governments and parliaments.

It was because we have a national veto on treaty change that our various Prime Minsters have been able to get the various acts that give the EU its powers through parliament. Would Major have sold Maastricht to the British parliament if there was ever any doubt in the minds of the MPs that they would not have the power to oppose any changes to that treaty.

Now the EU which is still, just, under the control of the states, wants to remove the sovereignty of those states to agree to changes to their own treaties.

It becomes clear exactly what Monnet meant when he said “We are not making a coalition of States, but are uniting people.” Perhaps he could have put it a little more succinctly
“We are Obliterating Nation States.”