Madam, - The summary of the the proposed EU Constitution in your issue of October 30th omitted what many would consider its two most important provisions.
The first is that the "Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe", to call it by its proper name, repeals all the European treaties up to now, from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Nice.
The second is that it then establishes what is legally, constitutionally and politically quite a new EU: in effect a European Federation, based like any state upon its own constitution, in which the existing member-states are reduced to the constitutional status of regions or provinces of the superior entity.
The constitution does this by giving the European Union its own legal personality and corporate existence separate from and superior to any of its individual member-states for the first time, just as with any federal state.
The constitution of this new EU then proclaims itself to be superior to the constitutions and law of its member-states, effectively in all areas of public policy either actually or potentially.
This would be a profound change from the present European Union, which is a descriptive term for the combination of the supranational European Community (EC), where EC law operates mainly in the relatively narrow economic area, and all the other "non-Community" areas of government where states still relate to one another "intergovernmentally", in EU jargon, as independent sovereign equals, such as foreign and security policy, crime, justice and home affairs, health, education, social security, etc.
If the EU constitution comes into force, it would become the fundamental source of legal authority within Europe, supplanting the constitutions of the member-states as the ultimate source of legal power for their citizens.
This new EU would become our legal sovereign, which would no longer be our own national State. Under the constitution the sovereign powers of the new EU would be vested in its Council, Commission, Court and Parliament, to which we would all owe loyalty and allegiance.
We would become real citizens of the EU for the first time, not just as an honorary title, an adjunct to national citizenship as at present under the Treaty of Maastricht, but with rights and obligations direct to the EU institutions rather than through our national institutions as hitherto. "The constitution is the capstone of a European federal state," said Belgian Premier Guy Verhofstadt in June.
The proposed new EU, founded on its own state constitution, would become a new European state in the world community of states. A weak state, perhaps, with some special historical features, but with virtually all the key features of statehood: a population, a territory, a currency, armed forces, a legislature, executive and judiciary, a foreign minister and diplomatic corps, some 100,000 pages of federal law, the right to conclude international treaties with other states in the ever-growing areas of its exclusive competence - and now of course its own flag, anthem and annual public holiday, which are given a legal basis for the first time in the treaty-cum-constitution now before us.
Do the peoples of Europe really want their countries to be reduced to a similar subordinate status vis-à-vis this new EU federation, as Bavaria has to Germany, Texas to the US or Quebec to Canada? None of the 25 member-state parliaments was given the opportunity to discuss beforehand whether the EU needed be founded on its own constitution like this, or the implications of such a step.
The constitution emerged from Giscard d'Estaing's Convention on the Future of Europe. This was mandated by the 2001 Laeken Declaration of EU presidents and premiers to make proposals to tackle the EU's lack of democracy, to consider restoring powers from Brussels to member-states and to consider "the possibility in the long run" of a constitutional text.
Instead, the convention, which was dominated by Euro-federalists, rushed headlong into drafting this constitution that centralises the EU into a state, removes important remaining powers from national parliaments and citizens, and does not propose to repatriate a single power from Brussels to the member-states.
Surely this cannot be the way to a more democratic future for Europe and its peoples? - Yours, etc.,
ANTHONY COUGHLAN,
Secretary, National Platform,
EU Research and
Information Centre,
Dublin 9.