FOLLOWING THE EUROPEAN UNION

georgeob1 wrote:

Had there been a direct vote in Germany on the new EU constitution, would it have been approved?

Some said correctly before that only a few politicans know exactly what the 'EU-constitution' is all about. How long would it take, to make nearly 70 million to experts?

Dead - but good for a transplant?

By Mark Mardell
Chief political correspondent

What is the future now for the European Union constitution's after it was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands.

Metaphors of death abound.

Former commissioners, academics, the "Yes" campaign, the "No" campaign, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, all queuing up to say the European constitution is dead.

But no government will say it - not even the British government, which prides itself on being more brutal and more candid about the whole business.

Jack Straw will make the direction of travel pretty obvious on Monday - when plans to get a bill on the referendum through Parliament are put on ice.

Well, put right at the back of the fridge actually, where they'll be forgotten.

One British government source explains it like this: "For us, it's as though a not very loved relative has just died, and we're eager to see what's in the will.

"But we know other members of the family are really devastated, and can't bring themselves to switch off the life support system."

But whatever they say in public, other countries planning to hold their own exercises in public humiliation - sorry, referendums - are getting very jittery.

The main Czech opposition party says it's pointless to go on - their government says France should vote again.

In fact those countries still on course for their own popular vote plan to ask the Dutch prime minister and the French president a pretty direct question when they all meet up in June: "Will you promise to vote on an unchanged treaty by a given date before we vote?"

Any equivocation in their answer and the rest of the referendum club could just be bold enough to use the D-word.

But that brings up an even more tasteless and grisly metaphor.

The former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, one of the authors of the constitution, has told a conference in London: "My beloved daughter is dead, but some of her organs can be transplanted to make the Nice Treaty more beautiful."

Double transplant

What's that all about? Well, there are two parts to this transplant.

Some pretty important things in this constitution don't need a treaty - prime ministers and presidents could just agree to do them.

A European Union foreign minister could be created like that.

So could the president of the European Council, an individual who would be in charge of chairing meetings, rather than the job being passed like a rather expensive and rather unattractive package from country to country every six months.

Plan B

The other idea which is being canvassed is a small focus treaty, which would change the voting systems for ministers, changing the balance of power to favour bigger countries, getting rid of some vetoes.

It'd be so small, so focused, that it wouldn't need a referendum, they say.

Oh yeah? This transplant would be hugely risky for the surgeons.

These are, after all, some of the more controversial measures in the EU constitution, to anyone even vaguely worried about the EU extending its power.

They would surely demand a new referendum, and denying it might look a trifle arrogant.

Granting it? Well it might be like one of those murder mysteries where you find out that the dead body was actually stabbed - then shot!

But the transplant surgeons are keen, very keen, that this is plan B.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/4602515.stm

Published: 2005/06/02 10:27:36 GMT

Some said correctly before that only a few politicans know exactly what the 'EU-constitution' is all about. How long would it take, to make nearly 70 million to experts?

The British Referendum has been "Put on Ice"........so at least Chirac wont be able to blame us for the Constitution debacle.......yet.

You see, Lord Ellpus, since 1963 I've been visiting frequently the motherland of the common wealth (to specify: England and Scotland).

The most peculiar funny thing was that I obviously met only those two and a half dozen of HM's subjects on those visits, who belong(ed) to the itsie-bitsie-teenie-weenie group of Europe-friendly people on this island between America and Europe.

Lord Ellpus wrote:

The British Referendum has been "Put on Ice"........so at least Chirac wont be able to blame us for the Constitution debacle.......yet.

Too bad -- a British referendum would have killed this constitution much deader much sooner than the festering which is going to happen now.

Monday June 6, 2005

Andrew Brown on the really important difference between Europe and America

I would not have voted for the European constitution because I want a better one, which means one at least 435 pages shorter.

If you can't get the central principles of any collective enterprise onto two sheets of A4 paper, there is something wrong. In this instance, the blame lies with the drafters of the constitution, rather than the enterprise. I want the European Union to succeed, and this desire increases with every chorus of triumphant sneering about the failure of the European social democratic model.

I want to vote for inefficiency, for sloth, and 35 hour weeks not because these things are goods in themselves, but because they are so much better than being chained to a treadmill of debt for 60 hours a week. There is nothing wrong or dishonourable in the fact that it is very much better to be poor in Europe than in the USA. It is a considerable political achievement, and we should be proud of our success, and defend and repair what has been built.

There is a very great deal that I love about the USA. But it is clearly absurd to suppose that everyone in the world should be trying as hard as they can to live like Americans, even if it were desirable or possible for them to do so. Some things can't successfully be transplanted. I don't much like the chi-chi bits of America that pretend to be European - the word over there is "Tony", which I always mishear as a man's name. They have small winding streets, gift shops and self-consciously organic foods. Still less could anyone love the parts of Europe that are closest to American suburbia. They get the soullessness all right, but they lack the sprawling abundance which redeems it - while the oil lasts.

But the thing which has most warmed my chauvinistic European heart this week has been the BBC. This is of course hated by most of the people who hate Europe, and for very much the same reasons. Absurd, self-important and slow-moving as it can be, the BBC can never quite rid itself of a Reithian strain in its heritage. It will still sometimes broadcast things for the love of excellence. The fact that taxpayers' money runs Radio 3 says that some part of the state is more than just an enabler of private prosperity. It is elitist, arrogant, self-confident, almost French.

This week, Radio 3 is playing the entire output of Beethoven and not much else. It started at nine on Sunday morning, and will finish late on Friday evening. So far as I know, nothing quite like this has ever been attempted before, and I doubt anyone but the BBC could attempt it. Certainly no American commercial station would. A public broadcasting (PBS) station might have a Beethoven season; an ambitious one might attempt to play everything worthwhile that he ever wrote. But it's hard to imagine anyone but Radio 3 playing everything he ever wrote, whether or not it is sublime. And even if the PBS station did all that - as some European state radio stations might - it still couldn't manage the final touch, which is to commission special recordings of all nine symphonies with its own orchestra, and then make them available for free and unrestricted download.

The downloadable music is an example of the way that the BBC's web presence is amplifying all the best things about it. Putting things on the web, where they are available to the whole world, does not make the world more homogenous: it is the sort of globalisation that sharpens the distinctiveness of nations and societies, and sometimes that can be a good thing.

Google, meanwhile, is attempting to put the indexed contents of great university libraries online. This isn't entirely disinterested, since Google will be able to sell advertising around the results, but it's still an astonishingly high-minded way to make a dollar. It is being opposed by the French, who think that it will not sufficiently stress the role of French literature in the civilisations of the world.

Though this looks purely spiteful - and certainly won't stop Google - it does bring out the underlying logic of these great gestures. They aren't in any obvious sense selfish, but neither are they entirely disinterested. Even Radio 3 can hope to make more money from its new global reach. The pursuit of enlightened self-interest brings the argument all the way back to the European constitution. What it ought to do can be put into a sentence: to ensure that within Europe, enlightened self-interest is easier than the other sort.

That really shouldn't need 437 pages. I could probably do it myself in two, but I seem to have run out of room.

* Andrew Brown maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog.

The British had a referendum in the 70's, asking whether we should join the "Common Market" (as that was what it was called in those days).
It was presented as just that....a common market, with free trade, free movement and freedom for its members to work anyhwere within its borders.
There was no mention of a single currency, there was not a hint that European Law would supercede British law, and there was certainly no mention of the creation of a future European Superstate, with one President and one interest rate for all member countries that adopted the Euro, whatever their own individual economic climate.

There was not a word about a European Constitution, which would be drawn up by a Frenchman with deep rooted French ideaologies, which, lets face it, are quite at odds with not only Britain but the modern trading world in general.

What is so wrong with just a simple "Common Market"?

Why do we need to place unneccesary restrictions on member countries and introduce reams and reams of new laws and conditions by which they have to run their lives?

A group of Democratic neighbouring Countries that agree to unrestricted trade with each other and allowing the free movement of its populations for reasons of work and play.................what is so difficult here?

The European Constitution, contrary to the suggestion here, wasnt exactly the exclusive brainchild of one senior French politician's creative genius, you know - even if the process of drafting it happened to have been overseen by a French chairman.

From what I understand, the Constitutional Convention was composed of over 100 members, ...