The new EU treaty would make the union superior to its member states, argues Anthony Coughlan.
The treaty embodying the revised European Union constitution, which will be called something different to facilitate its ratification, would do five important things.
Firstly, the new treaty would add to the powers of the Brussels institutions, which already make the majority of our laws, in more than 40 new policy areas - including energy, transport, tourism, sport, civil and criminal law, civil protection and public health - while correspondingly reducing the powers of national states, national parliaments and citizens.
Secondly, in making those laws, the new treaty would increase the voting weight of the bigger EU states and reduce that of smaller states such as Ireland.
Thirdly, it would deprive member states of the right to be represented at all times on the Brussels Commission, the body which has the monopoly on proposing European laws. Big states as well as small ones would lose a permanent commissioner, but the economic and political weight of the former makes them inherently better able to defend their interests without such representation.
Fourthly, the new treaty would contain a mechanism to enable majority voting for European law-making to be extended to new policy areas by agreement among governments, without the need for new treaty ratification.
Politically and constitutionally, however, the most important thing the new treaty would do would be to give to the new European Union that it would establish the constitutional form of a supranational state for the first time, making this new union separate from and superior to its 27 member states.
This would make the EU just like the United States of America in that the US is separate from, and constitutionally superior to, California and New York. Similarly, Germany is separate from and superior to Bavaria and Saxony.
We would all be made real citizens of this new EU state rather than notional or honorary European "citizens" as at present; for one can only be a citizen of a state.
It is this which would give the new treaty the character of a constitution or basic law for the new European Union it would establish. This change would be accomplished by three essential legal steps.
Firstly, the treaty would give the new European Union its own legal personality and distinct corporate existence for the first time, something that all states possess. This would enable the newly constituted EU to sign treaties with other states, have its own president, foreign minister - however called - diplomatic corps and public prosecutor, and take to itself all the powers and institutions of the existing European Community, which already has legal personality and which now makes most of our laws.
The symbols of European statehood - flag, anthem and national day - will be excised from the new treaty, for as Taoiseach Bertie Ahern explained vividly last weekend, these annoy a lot of people. But the state reality they symbolise would nonetheless come into being.
In this connection it is important to realise that what we call the European Union at present does not have legal personality or corporate existence, and what we term EU "citizenship" does not have supranational legal content.
Properly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as "EU" (European Union) law, only "EC" (European Community) law. That would change with the new treaty. What we call the European Union now, a name which derives from the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European Union, is merely a general descriptive term for the various forms of co-operation between its 27 member states - the area of supranational European law deriving from our continuing membership of the European Community, and the "intergovernmental" areas of foreign, justice and home affairs, where member states interact on the basis of retained sovereignty.
The second step in giving constitutional statehood to the new union would be to abolish this distinction between the supranational "community" and the "intergovernmental" areas of the existing European treaties. Thus all spheres of public policy would come within the scope of supranational EU law-making, either actually or potentially, as in any unified state.
The newly established union would then possess all the key features of a fully developed state, except the power to impose taxes and to take its constituent member states to war against their will. The Euro-integrationists hope it will acquire these remaining features in time.
The third legal step would be to make us all real citizens of this new EU state entity, with the normal citizens' duties of obedience to its laws and institutions and loyalty to its authority, over and above our obligations to our national constitutions and laws, with all the implications of that.
Those pushing the EU state-building project hope that voters will not notice the radical character of the constitutional change being proposed, for after all does not the EU exist already and are we not already EU "citizens"? These familiar terms would continue to be used as if nothing had changed, although their legal substance would be transformed fundamentally.
That is why the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which got us to use the terms "European Union" and EU "citizenship" for the first time, was titled a Treaty on European Union, not of union. The proposed new constitutional treaty would effectively be the Treaty of Union, although it will be called something else.
It would, in effect, be the capstone of the EU state edifice, which it is hoped to set in place nearly 60 years after the 1950 Schuman Declaration, which is commemorated annually on Europe Day, May 9th, proclaimed the European Coal and Steel Community to be the "first step in the federation of Europe".
People may welcome or decry these proposed constitutional changes, but clearly they call to be widely analysed and discussed before we vote on them.
Anthony Coughlan is senior lecturer emeritus in social policy, Trinity College Dublin, and secretary of the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre