EU Constitution

Estonia has become the 15th country to ratify the European Union Constitution. France and the Netherlands have already rejected it (by referendum), so the commonly held notion is that further votes are useless. However, in actual fact the EU constitution takes force when the last of the 25 EU member countries ratifies, so each countries ratification is important. Further, the rules governing when the EU constitution takes force require only that the member countries ratify the constitution; the rules do not specify how the ratification is to occur. In particular, it is not certain that the failure of referendums actually prohibits ratification by the government (although both France and the Netherlands have said they will abide by the referendum results).

I downloaded the English text of the EU constitution a few months ago, and made a good faith attempt to read it. It is over 400 pages long, very dense, rich with jargon — and looks less like what this American thinks of as a “constitution” and more like a liberal, politically correct, meandering manifesto. I got through perhaps 100 pages before I just could not take it anymore…

My predictions on the EU are these:

— Even without ratifying the “constitution", the EU is likely to collapse under its own weight. Take just one requirement: the translation of all EU documents into the native language of every member country. Already this is causing delays of years in the legislative and treaty efforts, as there aren’t enough translators to do the job. And at some point the people in the member states are going to wake up and realize that the EU’s top-heavy bureaucracy is serving its own interests above those of the member countries — and there will be a revolt (hopefully of the ballot-box kind).

— If the EU constitution is ever ratified, the process described above will accelerate tremendously — but a revolt will be vastly more difficult to accomplish.

— If the EU constitution is ever ratified, everything the EU tries to accomplish will be held up by endless court cases arguing about the interpretation of the constitution. If you think the squabbling in the U.S. is bad, just wait until you see what happens when the lawyers have over 400 pages of “guidance” to argue about!

The cartoon above right was sent to me by one of my friends in Estonia. He tells me that the caption reads (translated) like this: “We’ll get it ratified, turn up sleeves and start to bump off the ones who are not with us…” I think that cartoonist has the bureaucracy nailed perfectly — getting it ratified by any means necessary is precisely their agenda. And if they manage to do so, then watch out! So far as I can tell by my correspondence with several Estonians, the general population really doesn’t seem to care very much about the EU constitution, or about other aspects of the EU, such as adoption of the Euro. It’s clear from the polls (and my friends confirm this) that popular support for adopting the Euro has declined — but it’s also true that in general people there have only a vague understanding of the issues, pro and con. In other words, it’s just like here in the U.S. — only a few crazy people actually care enough about these things to become well informed. For example, none of my Estonian friends — whether ethnic Russians or Estonians — even claim to have read the EU constitution. One friend tells me that many members of parliment — the legislative body that votes on ratification in Estonia — have not read the EU constitution that they just voted to ratify. Apathy runs deep, apparently.