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European Constitution
June 23rd, 2007 at 01:48
For some reason, the EU leaders are all faffing about at the moment trying to revive the ailing EU constitution (coverage on Mark Mardell’s excellent blog)- something that will be akin to putting anti-septic cream on a corpse if Poland get their way.
If it were a visual metaphor, would be a sheet of paper with arms and legs struggling to gain its composure, as leaders wrangle over what it looks like. The original constitution was shot down by France and the Netherlands a couple of years ago when after a referendum, they announced that it was “shit” (paraphrasing), so the new plan is to cut it down to something everyone can agree on.
Apparently the French got a bit removed that committed the Union to free-trade (wry comment: typical!), and Britain wouldn’t budge on the EU having its own foreign minister. But Britain are happy with having a High Representative – who will presumably have exactly the same powers as the proposed foreign minister, just not the name. If the name is all the fuss is about, then from the beginning they should have just given everything in the EU arbitrary names…
If they’d have called the foreign minister the official EU Wayne, then no one would have complained, yet Wayne could still travel around the world doing whatever it is that a foreign minister does. The same theory could be applied to other contentious areas of policy. The French might get on board dismantling the CAP if the plan were named Pierre.
It does concern me that they’ll dismantle the constitution (or “reform treaty” as Blair wants it to be called) so much then it’ll be practically worthless. I assume the final text will be something like:
Article 1: The European Union is a group of countries
Article 2: The European Union’s abbreviation is the ‘EU’ (or ‘UE’ in French…)
Article 3: Lets worry about all of the organisational stuff later, yeah?
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