Statement from the National Platform, Ireland

EU Social Democrat Leaders Back a Further Assault on National Democracy

Leading EU social democrats get together today in Dublin with Ireland’s Ruairi Quinn, Proinsias de Rossa and John Hume to back a nominated Convention to be charged with the task of producing drafts of an EU State Constitution or constitutional Treaty to be put into law in 2004. EU Foreign Ministers agreed on Monday last that a nominated Convention, similar to the body which drew up the EU Fundamental Rights Charter, would draw up a draft or drafts of a grand EU State Constitution. This would then be presented to an EU Intergovernmental Conference for incorporation in a new EU Treaty in 2004.

Purpose of ‘convention method’: to prevent disussions

The essential purpose of this ‘convention method’ for drawing up a draft EU State Constitution is to prevent the national parliaments of the 15 EU Member States from first discussing in advance the future of the EU, and deciding on the principle of whether they or their electorates want an EU State Constitution in the first place. Such national parliamentary discussion as takes place will be on who will be the two nominees to this ‘Future of Europe’ Convention, not on what the Convention itself is designed to do.

The Euro-federalists—who after all always know what is best for us!—have decided that the EU must have a State Constitution, now that it has got those two classical key features of statehood, its own currency with the euro and its own army with the embryonic Rapid Reaction Force. An EU Constitution is meant in effect to be a State Constitution.

Using the ‘convention method’ to draw it up is designed to avoid any discussion by national parliaments in advance on whether they want to take this further giant step towards an EU Superstate or not. The so-called ‘convention method’ being advocated in Dublin today by prominent Euro-social democrats, Messrs Crespo, Haensch, Corbett and Murphy, is essentially an undemocratic device to by-pass national parliaments and prevent them having any input beforehand into the EU State Constitution-making process.

The EU Foreign Ministers have agreed that the 15 Member State Governments will nominate one representative each to this Convention, and national parliaments will nominate two each, one from the Government parties and one from the Opppositon. The Convention will also have representatives of the EU Commission and European Parliament.

Use of this ‘convention method’ to draft the EU Fundamental Rights Charter, which is politically endorsed in the Treaty of Nice and is to be incorporated into an EU Constitution in the 2004 Treaty, ensured that the provisions and substantive content of this Charter were never discussed in any national parliament, or even in the European Parliament, even though they contain things that should be objectionable to any consistent democrat.

EU State Constitution would be presented as a ‘fait accompli’

The same undemocratic method is now envisaged for drafting the basic texts for an EU State Constitution, which will be presented as a ‘fait accompli’ to an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) in three years time. National parliaments too will be presented with a ‘fait accompli’ and will have no opportunity to discuss or decide in advance the merits of the whole process, and whether they or their governments should participate in it at all.

The significance of this clever scheme for ‘Europeanising’ further our politics and our daily lives, reducing our national democracy and undermining the nation state, is likely to be ignored by the general media for the present as just another ‘boring’ EU development. But it is likely it time to be seen as another significant moment in the relentless erosion of national democracy in the EU Member States.