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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 November 2002 01.08 GMT
Last week, the trigger for another bout of absurd commentary was M. Giscard d'Estaing's preliminary draft for what might become the hotly debated constitution for the European Union. Suddenly, the air was thick with foreboding. In the Daily Mail, Edward Heathcoat Amory warned of a Euro Today programme, monumental Euro taxes and a Euro thought-police. Written in calmer times, it would be seen as the fulminations of a man close to losing his senses.
In the Times, Anatole Kaletsky, one of the country's most perceptive economic journalists, seemed convinced that the document presaged the entrenchment of a democratic deficit so severe and a bureaucratic centre so powerful and unconstrained that the moment had come to abandon the whole European project. The Government briefed that nobody should worry; the continentals' dark schemes would not come to pass. It required some luck to discover what the actual document contained.
I thus took it upon myself to read it. It is 18 pages long, of which the first seven are an extended draft outline of its possible contents. The remaining 11 contain 46 entries, most no more than a sentence long, framed in terms such as 'this article should set out...', 'this article would list...', 'this article indicates...' or 'the wording of this article will depend on the proceeding of the working group...' and so on. A definitive constitution this is not.
But it does have the inflammatory title 'Preliminary Draft Constitutional Treaty'. It has the temerity to suggest that it is seeking to create an area of 'liberty, security and justice', establish rights attached to European citizenship and what the responsibilities of the various political and legal machinery of the EU might be. Its aim is to address the very shortcomings that Kaletsky and other anti-Europeans raise. It wants a simple codification of how Europe should govern its affairs and some plain and easily understood rules about who does what and why.
There are a number of innovations, although none goes much beyond what is possible in a single-sentence framework of draft articles. The EU should have a single institutional structure, it says, so that in whatever area of policy in which it engages the same principles should apply. It should establish what should be exclusively done at EU level, what should be shared with member states and what should be reserved for the states, although it does not attempt to give the answers. It would provide for a Congress of the Peoples of Europe further to advance the supervision of Europe's institutions and debate key issues.
It requires that every European institution should have a high level of openness, maximising the opportunity for 'citizens' organisations of all kinds to play a full part in the Union's affairs'. It provides for the voluntary withdrawal of states that no longer want to remain members. It provides for, but does not prescribe, how a president of the European Council might be appointed to replace the current cumbersome system in which each member state is president for six months.
By way of analogy, consider Britain producing a draft constitution. It might include provisions for the voluntary withdrawal of Scotland or Wales if they felt the British political architecture was unfair and undemocratic. It might include the right to watch Cabinet meetings whose deliberations would have to be public. It might even include a new Congress of the British, meeting regu larly to appraise the democracy of our public institutions, formal rights for town, city and local authorities and a requirement for maximum transparency at every level in the system.
Accusations by the Kaletskys and Heathcoat Amorys that the whole effort was about generating less democracy would be obviously absurd. But repeat the exercise at European level and more visceral instincts kick in, as Denis MacShane, the exemplary pro-European Minister for Europe, is set to discover.
Three forces are at work: denial of contemporary reality, incomplete knowledge verging on ignorance about European institutions and a complex nexus which celebrates the American and distrusts the non-Anglo-Saxon. The reality is that globalisation is challenging to all national economic and political structures; it reduces autonomy, circumscribes action and forces countries into new multinational coalitions to achieve their objectives. It requires regulation and governance.
Europeans are lucky that unlike, say, South Americans or Asians, they have a multilateral structure in the form of the EU through which to react. In this respect, the EU's attempt to introduce true democracy into multilateral processes is the future, not the past.
Equally, the degree of the EU's powers is vastly overstated and its inbuilt checks and balances under-reported. Apart from multilateral trade negotiations, competition policy, agriculture and the managing of the single currency, which are done at European level and which, in any case, involve the checks and balances of the European parliament, European Council, ratification by national parliaments etc, the rest of policy lies firmly with nation states which may or may not choose to co-ordinate what they do.
In fiscal policy, one result of this co-ordination is the baleful Growth and Stability Pact which needs reform. But in constitutional terms, this is a pact that has been voluntarily agreed by member states and, thankfully, can be voluntarily changed. I share Kaletsky's scathing criticisms, but my reaction is to argue for its replacement rather than to use it a reason to end European multilateral initiatives.
But I acknowledge my European leanings. I admire the US, but Europeans, including the British, have different priorities and beliefs that we better express together rather than apart. That we do it imperfectly is no reason to give up on the effort - it's a reason to do better. D'Estaing's preliminary draft constitution offers the chance of real improvement, but only if you believe in the EU. That, in the end, is the heart of the matter.
