Madam, - The official title of the Treaty the EU leaders hope to sign in Rome next weekend is "Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe." Calling it a "constitutional treaty," as you do editorially (December 2nd) and as your European correspondent Denis Staunton does in his reports, may mislead people as to its character. Does the term "constitutional treaty" make journalistic or common sense?
A constitution, as you know, is very different from a treaty. A constitution is the fundamental law of a state. A treaty is an agreement between states. What the proposed new treaty does is to wind up the EC/EU we have been members of since 1973 by repealing all the existing European treaties, from the Rome Treaty to the Treaty of Nice. Its Article IV-2 does this. It then refounds the EU on the basis of its own constitution or fundamental law, just as with any other state.
Article 1 says: "This Constitution establishes the European Union." So the union we are currently members of, which was established by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, is replaced by a union that is constitutionally quite different and new. Hitherto the EU has been the creature of its member states under the treaties and has had no legal existence apart from its members. The Constitution changes this by giving the EU legal personality for the first time. This turns the EU into an actor on the international stage in its own right, separate from and superior to its member states.
Henceforth the EU rather than its states will sign international treaties on virtually every area of policy. Article I-10 states: "The Constitution, and law adopted by the Union's institutions in exercising competences conferred on it, shall have primacy over the law of the member-states." This has never been stated in an EU treaty before. The EU Constitution thus has primacy over the Irish Constitution.
Clearly states that put themselves under a constitution containing such an article can no longer regard themselves as independent or sovereign in the way the world's other 170 or so states are. EU members become more like Bavaria, New York, Queensland or Quebec - subordinate states or provinces within a superior federal state that has primacy over them internationally and domestically.
The proposed Constitution establishes an EU political president, an EU foreign minister and diplomatic corps, and an EU public prosecutor. It gives the EU Court of Justice power to decide our fundamental rights in the vast area covered by EU law, thereby greatly extending the power of a court notorious for its "competency creep."
It abolishes the national veto in some 27 policy areas and shifts law-making with regard to them from national parliaments to the EU Council of Ministers. This is on top of the 35 policy areas surrendered in last year's Treaty of Nice and 19 in the 1998 Amsterdam Treaty.
One important area it gives the EU power to make laws for is that of criminal and civil law and procedures, which could affect our right to trial by jury and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. There is an extraordinary "escalator" Article, I-24 (4), which gives the EU presidents and prime ministers the power to shift further policy areas from unanimity to majority voting without requiring new EU treaties or even the express consent of national parliaments.
The draft Constitution changes the rules of running this new EU to make population size fundamental to Brussels law-making. This greatly increases the voting power of the big states and makes EU laws much easier for them to push through or block. It licenses the big states to use EU military and other resources for foreign interventions they favour, but which some member states oppose.
If the EU is refounded on the basis of this Constitution, the only major feature of statehood the EU will not possess is the right and power to tax people directly. Eurofederalists regard this as only a matter of time.
Irish people traditionally have looked positively on the EU, but do they want this country to become a province in an EU federal state?
Whether you or your journalistic staff think these features of the proposed EU Constitution good or bad, is it not remarkable that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, leader of a party whose sub-title is "The Republican Party", should go to the EU summit in Rome intending to sign up ourselves, our children and our grandchildren to them, even though Dáil and Seanad Éireann have never discussed their desirability?
Nor has there been any public or media debate on their implications. What does this say about the state of our democracy, which, in case anyone needs reminding, means rule by the people? - Yours, etc.,
ANTHONY COUGHLAN, Secretary, The National Platform, 24 Crawford Ave, Dublin 9.