eurealist.co.uk

EU Communication Commissioner Margot Wallström supports Andrew Duff’s idea of a new Constitutional text which should be based on the current Constitution with added bits.

The proposal is based on the existing text and foresees keeping the Preamble, as well as Parts I and II. With respect to Part III he intends to add and put more emphasis on the elements of:

• Economic governance and the Lisbon agenda;
• the European social model with a possibility to sign up to a Protocol on a Social Union;
• tackling climate change;
• enlargement policy, with the innovation of adding a new category of associate membership, and;
• the financial system.

Further, he proposes a “constitutional co-decision” with the new text being jointly approved by the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) and the European Parliament. And possibly EU-wide poll at the end of the process

Strictly speaking, Duff says: “only Ireland need hold a referendum as part of the ratification process for any change to an EU treaty. The several governments which have chosen the referendum route more or less voluntarily, for one reason or another, would be relieved, no doubt, to find an alternative democratic solution that would enhance the prospects of the constitution entering into force eventually. Denmark, France, Holland, Portugal and the UK fall into this category.”

One suggestion is to hold a consultative ballot to test public opinion about the final package across the Union, preferably at the same time as the European Parliamentary elections in June 2009. That would have the advantage of bringing a European focus to those elections and, one would hope, in boosting turnout. The consultative nature of the exercise would not make it in a strict sense part of the formal ratification process. He might well have added in which case if it all goes wrong again we can simply ignore the ballot.

Another proposal is to allow all the classical parliamentary ratification procedures to take place first and then to submit the constitution to a final, yet formal and single referendum across the EU. In this case, the national ratifications would establish the constitution on a provisional basis subject to confirmation by a (simple or qualified) majority of European citizens. Article IV-447 would have to be re-drafted to accommodate either scheme.
Not withstanding that this would also need ratification because it is the veto on any changes to the treaty.

Margot Wallström warned that “the EU can’t afford a second failure and needs to prove that we have listened”

I wonder too what she or Duff have been listening, the people of Britian have not been allowed a vote on the document, yet they are now seeking ways of circumventing the British people basic right to objection. Duff makes the point in his pamphlet that when questioned about the EU a quarter of the British people volunteered that they did not wish to be EU citizens, although that was not one of the questions. So neither he nor Wallström can be in any doubt about the prospects of a British Referendum.

Duff has called his pamphlet “How to Rescue the European Constitution” It would seem that the answer is to ignore anything and everything which can stand it its way, the people, the present treaties or what ever it takes to get this EU Constitution through, he has even suggested “the nuclear option, which is to try to change Article 48 of the existing Treaty so that its further revision – that is, the entry into force of the new constitutional treaty – would be enacted before all member states had completed national ratification according to their own constitutional requirements. Declaration 30 and Article IV-443.4 of the 2004 text would suggest a threshold of four fifths.

But Duff rather disappointedly moans that: a special IGC just to modify Article 48 looks impossible now.

How to Rescue the European Constitution