Madam, - RTÉ Radio (December 13th) reported the breakdown of the EU Intergovernmental Conference on a draft of the misnamed "Constitutional Treaty for the European Union". An interviewee spoke from Brussels and he referred to "the people of Europe".
There is not now and there never has been a "people of Europe". The reality is there are various peoples in Europe, with "their own national identities" as history records and as recognised in words by the Preamble to the EU's draft treaty "establishing (sic) a Constitution for Europe".
Germany's constitutional court emphasised this reality in some detail by its ruling following the Maastricht Treaty, Brunner:
1. There is not a single European people, there are only peoples (and their sovereign national states);
2. Any powers the EU possesses are limited being merely conferred by the EU's member nation states.
Obviously, the EU Constitution's attempt to arrogate artificial "legal personality" to the EU in no way reduces or negates either material fact.
The German judges noted that neither the EU nor its Court of Justice has kompetenz-kompetenz - in other words, neither can decide the extent of its own competences. Such decision must lie with the courts of member nation states much as Denmark's Supreme Court ruled in 1998 (Carlsen v Prime Minister of Denmark).
Democracy, they went on, is protected only by the parliaments of nation states, not by a European Parliament (in which the 13 MEPs to be elected by Éire's voters are outnumbered by 719 foreigners not elected by Éire's voters). In any event, no democracy can tolerate cleverly tendentious drafting of an international treaty surreptitiously providing for ever-expanding "implied powers" to be used supposedly to protect the Single Market but really to impose a federal EU super-state by stealthy erosion of powers of member nation states. The historian Lord Acton warned about power corrupting and the "accredited mendacity" of international diplomacy.
In 1947, the British Design for Freedom Committee published a pamphlet Design for Europe. It included the following " ... it is as well to state this bluntly at the outset, no government dependent on a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifices which any adequate plan must involve. The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their natural economic defences ... " (my italics) The new "Constitution for Europe" could, for example, thus stealthily erode Éire's veto that prevents Brussels from interfering in taxation here and eventually lead to transferring control of Éire's fiscal, financial and economic affairs from Oireachtas to Brussels.
See how the EU Commission tried to intimidate little Éire's Mr McCreevy with threatened penalties unless he limited budget deficit borrowing to a 3 per cent of gross domestic product this very year. Yet big France and Germany have driven a coach and four through that 3 per cent for years without penalty, and still do today despite the new EU Constitution's providing for such penalty, Article 111-76.
It seems that the EU's big countries' big people are more equal than EU's little countries' little people. No wonder the Poles stood their ground. - Yours, etc.,
E.G. EVERARD HEWSON,
The Crescent,
Galway.
... ...
Madam, - The enthusiasm of the present Government for privatisation is characteristic of a new orthodoxy of economic neo-liberalism that has been in the ascendancy in the West for the past two decades.
Reagan and Thatcher were the first and the best known political advocates of this radical economic model.
According to this economic philosophy, state-delivered public services represent missed opportunities for private business. Furthermore, the profit motive is understood to be the only guarantor of truly efficient services for consumers. Values such as equity, justice, universal access, or fundamental human rights have no place within the neo-liberal economic model.
The present Government has been preparing state companies like Dublin Bus and Aer Lingus for privatisation for some years now.
However, public services such as health and education have been considered sacrosanct, and it is unlikely that any Government Minister would have the courage to propose their privatisation.
It now appears that no Irish Minister will have to do so, as a commitment to open these areas up to international trade, liberalisation and eventual privatisation is contained within the draft EU constitutional treaty as highlighted in a recent letter to your paper.
All is not lost however, as the failure of heads of state to reach agreement in the recent IGC has meant that Ireland will now be in a pivotal position to influence the agenda for negotiations during its six month's Presidency in 2004.
If any of your readers feel alarmed at the thought of essential health and educational services in Ireland being delivered largely by the private sector on a commercial, profit-making basis, then I urge them to contact Government Ministers and TDs and to lobby them to restore to the new constitutional treaty the national veto on health, education and cultural and audiovisual policy that formed part of Article 133 of the Nice Treaty.
If the Irish Presidency can achieve this objective during its short Presidency, it will have served European citizens well. - Yours, etc.,
Cllr DEIRDRE DE BURCA, (Green Party), Bray, Co Wicklow.