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| 50204 |
Consitution
Hi everybody,
I suppose that everybody has heard of the european constitution. Perhaps you know that pools foresee a vote against the projekt. Jacques Chirac tries to reverse trend, but it seems that he failed. It's difficult to know advantages and drawbacks of such a constitution. Moreover, I don't have enough time to read it, in fact it contains 500 pages!
I know that bulletin board's users are not only european guys, yet I think that they can have an opinion.
What do you think of the constitution?
Do you think I should vote for or against?
Thank you
See you soon guys!
Quentin
Pau, France
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Language pair: English; All
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| 50257 |
Re:Consitution: Pt 1 of 2
Hi Quentin,
What a great question; it's interesting, I think, how this really ties in with some of what we've been talking about regarding the media. Here's a chance to show you how I deal with having an imperfect media.
It is important for me, too, to know what the EU constitution would be like, so I love being prompted to go do some research. Just one piece for tonight—Ii don't want to be up too late.
I started by doing a web search for European Union Constitution, and found a web site whose job is to provide information on the EU and its workings to the public. At that site, I found a 20-page brochure designed to explain the constitution and how it works. Of course, I don't mistake this for a thorough, objective presentation. It is designed with the purpose of convincing all readers that the constitution is good and everyone should vote for it. But we'll compensate for that later by checking out a few other sights whose purpose is to defeat the proposed constitution. With a little thoughtful research, we can learn enough to have an informed opinion. Following are my thoughts after reading the brochure.
I like the provisions for unity, human rights, and solidarity.
Page 8 mentions an Initiative System that provides whenever 1 million citizens from a certain number of states (doesn't say if that's 1 million all together, or a million from each nation) so requires, a concern can be added to the ballot for a union-wide vote.
We have a similar initiative process here in the state of California, and as committed as I am to the importance of giving the people a means of having their concerns addressed, this process has not been working well for us. It has become a mechanism where anybody with tons of money to hire employees to gather signatures and to buy advertising can pretty much change our state constitution any way they want. The process has empowered the rich, not the people. And it makes me sick to see what it has done to our poor constitution.
(Continued: Part 2 of 2.)
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 50204
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| 50259 |
Re:Consitution: Pt 2 of 2
EU Constitution, first glance, Part 2 of 2.
The constitution uses a model of "marble cake" federalism similar to that established by our own constitution in the U.S. The EU C seeks to avoid the excesses of over centralization and undercentralization by establishing clear boundaries between powers that belong to the EU, those that belong to the member nations, and those that are shared between the collective and individual government organizations.
The constitution also seeks to maintain accountability by dividing powers among separate organizations within the government
It's easy to see how it got to be 500 pages long. What the reserved powers rule of the 10th amendment to the U.S. constitution says in a sentence is presented as three major provisions in the E.U.'s: the Principle of conferral of competences (this one by itself is pretty much what our 10th amendment does: Reserves to the states or to the people any power not explicitly designated as belonging to the central government). Additionaly, there's the Principle of subsidiarity, saying that the EU Government can't mess in anything else unless it's clearly so monumental that none of the national governments can take it on. The E.U. is then allowed to step in and add that to it's powers (or "competencies," as the EU wants to call them) and take it on. Finally, the EU is prohibited from developing resources beyond those required to accomplish it's work.
It seems natural that a key purpose of the EU Constitution is to provide mechanisms to ensure broad economic opportunity by creating a free trade zone. Perhaps this was already established with the distribution of the Euro, but keep in mind that another main purpose of the document is to consolidate a series of treaties that have been signed by Europeans over the past 50 years. The idea is to put all of the old stuff that hasn't been superseded into a single document, the constitution. But this brochure doesn't address that at all. That's a very interesting omission. Perhaps they don't feel citizens will support the constitution when they see this provisions.
Overall, however, the summary illustrates a document that is thoughtful and complicated enough to have a fair chance of doing the job. Overall, I like what it is doing. I look forward to seeing other arguments, both for and against this.
Talk to you soon,
Mark Springer
Sac CA USA.
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 50204
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| 50280 |
Constitution--per the framers: 1 of 3
Hi Quentin,
At the risk of stating the obvious here, I want to point out that I don't intend to tell anyone how to vote on the EU constitution. My intent currently is to dig up what I can in terms of facts and of opposing viewpoints on the subject, in an effort to help us all get educated. But don't forget to question my objectivity. It is never possible for anyone to catch all of their own biases, and I certainly have plenty.
Some comments about yesterday's brochure, after having perused it at more leisure. What I notice is that there are essentially going to be at least three significant groups interested in opposing it, just that I have noticed so far.
First, since the document places such high priority on social justice, ecological awareness, and human rights, EU membership will place burdens on business that they do not necessarily face at present. Naturally, they will resist this. It will increase their costs, force them to raise their prices, and increase the challenges they face in competing, both amongst themselves and with businesses outside the EU.
On the left, there will also be a significant amount of resistance. As ambitious as the constitution appears (certainly in its aims—I have yet to learn how effective its plans may be for accomplishing them) in creating a people-friendly, sustainable, diversity embracing super-nation, there will always be people even further to the left complaining that it doesn't go far enough, that it's measures will not be effective, that it overlooks some critical aspect. This comes back to the point of how easy it is to sit on the side and point out what an awful job the person doing the work has done. It's also a function of the impossibility of pleasing everyone. And, too, some of these concerns will be very important to pay attention to.
Finally, there will be those on the right who are horrified by the fact that some national sovereignty must be surrendered to an extra-national body. Certainly, that would be a huge problem here in the U.S. Apart of the concern has some validity. We were subject to an outside power a couple of hundred years back, and it didn’t work for us. Many Americans are not willing to consider that now, in a new age, with a different power under a modern constitution such an arrangement could be far more useful. We neglect to acknowledge that we already have such an arrangement, in fact, as fifty sovereign states joined under a federal government in Washington, D.C. and consequently, many U.S. citizens complain of our involvement in NATO, arguing that this organization is somehow a threat to our freedom and sovereignty. It's pretty funny, actually.
(Continued: Part 2 of 3)
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 50204
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| 50281 |
Consitution--Per the framers: part 2 of 3
EU Constitution, first glance, Part 2 of 3.
But the fact is, this issue of ceding powers to a centralized governmental body always has advantages and disadvantages. Your Constitution is clearly sensitive to this, as the three principles of conferral of competences, of subsidiarity, and of proportionality suggest. Like our U.S. Constitution's 10th amendment, the idea is to give to the central government only those powers which it can carry out more effectively than member nations, reserving all others to the nations themselves. This is what we call "marble-cake" federalism: Powers are shared in a wavy boundary between the central and state governments—some to the central government, some to the individual states, others shared between them—what your constitution refers to as "competences," and ours refers to as "powers."
The structure of government established is really complicated. You may be aware that the U.S., as well as many democratic governments, we have a tri-partite government (an executive branch, headed by our president, a legislative branch containing a two-house law-making body, and a judicial branch) Our legislatures are usually bicameral, having two houses.
The EU appears to plan five parts, three of which seem to be involved in law-making, the other two being, apparently, your judicial and executive bodies. From what I can tell looking at the diagram (If anyone has found the EU public information site and downloaded or printed out their pamphlet on the constitution, I'm looking at page 7), it appears that the Council of Ministers will be an upper house, the European Parliament the lower house, and that the European Commission will have exclusive power to propose legislation. The upper and lower houses will decide what passes, but they can't pass anything that has not been proposed by the commission. That's a pretty interesting arrangement.
My guess here, is that like the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who wanted to make changing established policies as difficult as possible (so as to prevent change without due deliberation), they have created a situation that prevents changes from occurring without the direct involvement of many separate authorities. Like the U.S.'s, your Constitutions provides many checks and balances – ways of stopping or countering the actions of other authorities within the system that may not serve the common good..
The pamphlet also cites a number of measures which, the EU seems to hope will improve security and justice among member nations. Asylum and immigration policies are to be standardized throughout the union, internal borders' security relaxed, and external border security tightened. Arrangements are to be made to facilitate cooperation among security authorities of member nations and those of the EU, and Europol is to be both strengthened and monitored more carefully.
(Continued: Part 3 of 3.)
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This is a reply to message # 50204
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| 50282 |
Consitution--per the framers: 3 of 3.
EU Constitution, first glance, Part 3 of 3.
Finally, a significant redistribution of capital is planned in order to support those areas which are struggling economically to compete among other EU regions. A third of monies contributed to the EU will be distributed to specific disadvantaged areas to use as they deem fit, within the principles of EU economic policy—that is, they cannot support ecologically harmful activities, or those that violate human rights.
It seems to be a remarkable document. Very ambitious, and committed to values of the highest order. It is important, of course, to recognize the relations between the goals of the document and the reality. In our country, we declared that all men had inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while sixty years later, we were still holding slaves.
This is not to say, however, that your representatives to the EU have not provided you with a fine set of stars to steer by as a growing union.
In summary, what the pamphlet offers looks pretty wonderful to me, with the one reservation I have about the initiative process, and my concerns regarding any measures they may take to prevent big monied interests from subverting it to their own greedy ends.
On the other hand, the devil is in the details, as we often say, and since we've agreed we're not going to try to read a 500 page constitution ourselves (I ran across an annotated copy that was 220 pages long – is it possible that this is the correct number, and somebody was exaggerating, or is my annotated version abridged?) we're going to look next for some people who will tell us what is wrong with the constitution and why it's not going to be beneficial to member nations, or why it can't accomplish what it claims it will do.
But don't let me do all the work. I want to see posts from all of you as you browse around the internet. Let's get some real discussion going here!
Talk to you soon,
Mark Springer
Sac CA USA.
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 50204
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| 50311 |
Democratic Legitimacy part 1 of 4
Hi!
I've dug up some information as to why voices who favor the EU constitution think it’s a good thing, and shared with you some of my response (obviously from a purely American viepoint—I could hardly offer any other) to what I found.
The next stage of my research into this brings me to a couple of sites who are working Internationally to oppose the ratification of the Constitution. Here are some of the ideas I found:
Professor Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider of Germany advocates denial of ratification on the grounds that the people of the member nations were not consulted in its development. This brings up a very interesting issue of precisely what it is we mean by democracy.
Skip this paragraph if I've already said this—I don't recall as I write, but when we talk about democracy, we usually mean it in a very general sense in which a republic is a specific form of democracy. If we want to talk about democracy in the narrowest sense of the term, we would refer to a form of government that would be prohibitively difficult to practice. In such a state, every citizen would be a member of the legislature, and would have to be a full-time politician in addition to all of their personal responsibilities and duties. Since most of this are not willing to invest that much of a commitment in our political processes, we are delighted to elect representatives to attend to our political needs for us so that we can give our personal lives their due attention. Therefore, as far as I know, not a single "democracy" in the world is a true democracy, but a republic of some form, where the people delegate the bulk of their democratic authority to an elected representative.
Now I won't try to argue that Professor Schachtschneider is assuming that the EU should be a true democracy; I'm sure that's not his intent, but as I read his arguments, it seems clear that his vision of European democracy is much closer to that end of the spectrum than, for example, that of my own country, whose constitution was developed in very much the same fashion in which yours seems to be emerging. We called a second Constitutional Congress (I think I've mentioned already that our present constitution was our second effort), and interestingly, the representatives were sent to Philadelphia with a commission to "revise the articles of confederation." I had mentioned before that the Articles of Confederation was our first "constitution," and was failing because it didn't give the central government enough power to do its job of fostering cohesiveness and cooperation among the states.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4)
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This is a reply to message # 50283
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| 50312 |
Democratic Legitimacy part 1 of 4
Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Well, the representatives of our Constitutional Congress played a dirty trick on us. They made a command decision to overturn their commission and choose a job that they felt would more effectively accomplish the goals they were sent to achieve.
Does this mean that our constitution does not have "democratic legitimacy?" That's a very interesting question. I guess first we have to know what "democratic legitimacy" is. There are probably a million definitions of it, and certainly people on all sides of this issue will offer varying ones. I would like to submit a practical definition to work with for this discussion: A government derives it's power from the faith and trust of its citizens, and I would argue that this would be the key measure of democratic legitimacy. When Hitler marched into many European countries, perhaps the biggest reason for our International outrage, was that the offended nations' sovereignty was trampled. For those nations who were, at that time, democratic states, the issue was one of democratic legitimacy. The people of such countries were not willing to accept Nazi rule. This was not, for them, a democratically legitimate government.
The United States faced a related, if quite dissimilar national crisis in 2000, when the Bush / Gore election was so close that one candidate one the popular vote, and the other won the electoral vote, and the margin of error in awarding the electoral votes was much larger than the differences between the candidates in the closest races. Nobody ever really knew who won the election, which finally had to be decided in the Supreme Court. What this means is that the Supreme Court, not the voters, chose our president in 2000. For many voters (admittedly, most of whom were Gore supporters) this cast a significant doubt on Bush's legitimacy as President of the United States. Thankfully we weathered that storm, and we're still here, rather beaten and bruised by the Supreme Court's decision, but we're still here, and we're still a free, legitimate democracy, with all of our problems.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4)
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This is a reply to message # 50283
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| 50313 |
Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Democratic Legitimacy part 2 of 4
Well, the representatives of our Constitutional Congress played a dirty trick on us. They made a command decision to overturn their commission and choose a job that they felt would more effectively accomplish the goals they were sent to achieve.
Does this mean that our constitution does not have "democratic legitimacy?" That's a very interesting question. I guess first we have to know what "democratic legitimacy" is. There are probably a million definitions of it, and certainly people on all sides of this issue will offer varying ones. I would like to submit a practical definition to work with for this discussion: A government derives it's power from the faith and trust of its citizens, and I would argue that this would be the key measure of democratic legitimacy. When Hitler marched into many European countries, perhaps the biggest reason for our International outrage, was that the offended nations' sovereignty was trampled. For those nations who were, at that time, democratic states, the issue was one of democratic legitimacy. The people of such countries were not willing to accept Nazi rule. This was not, for them, a democratically legitimate government.
The United States faced a related, if quite dissimilar national crisis in 2000, when the Bush / Gore election was so close that one candidate one the popular vote, and the other won the electoral vote, and the margin of error in awarding the electoral votes was much larger than the differences between the candidates in the closest races. Nobody ever really knew who won the election, which finally had to be decided in the Supreme Court. What this means is that the Supreme Court, not the voters, chose our president in 2000. For many voters (admittedly, most of whom were Gore supporters) this cast a significant doubt on Bush's legitimacy as President of the United States. Thankfully we weathered that storm, and we're still here, rather beaten and bruised by the Supreme Court's decision, but we're still here, and we're still a free, legitimate democracy, with all of our problems.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4)
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This is a reply to message # 50283
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| 50315 |
Democratic Legitimacy part 3 of 4
So I guess what my conclusion is here, my opinion, is that there may be a couple of ways to read Dr. S's claim that the EU Constitution would lack Democratic Legitimacy. One might be that in his opinion, it would not be democratically legitimate, that he expects to see more involvement of the citizens of EU member nations in order to agree that the Constitution would be a valid reflection of the democratic values of the EU. The other way to read him might be that he expects that the people of the EU will not agree that this process of development is democratically legitimate. I guess what I see as important to notice here is that Democratic Legitmacy is not an objective characteristic like red hair or number of words, or whether or not the constitution addresses matters of security. Legitimacy is a social value, and is strictly a matter of perception on the part of a huge body of people. The constitution will be legitimate of the people of the member states find it legitimate, and it won't be if they don't.
So if Dr. S feels that the constitution is not democratically legitimate, he's got a very difficult argument to make. The U. S. Constitution was written by public representatives acting outside of their commission on behalf of the people of the states. We find our constitution to be legitimate because, even though our representatives chose not to follow our instructions in doing their work, each individual state did subsequently ratify the constitution, through votes by duly elected representatives of the people. It is true that the people of the states never voted on the constitution, but the individuals who all agreed to accept the constitution were all elected representatives of the people. This was a valid democratic process under the values of our republic. So while we've had a few constitutional crises, we have weathered them all (so far), and this is, I think, a great testament to the democratic validity of our constitution.
(Cont'd: Democratic Legitimacy part 4 of 4)
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This is a reply to message # 50283
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| 50316 |
Democratic Legitimacy part 4 of 4
Now does this mean that the same process, that mapped out for the ratification of the EU constitution, will have democratic validity? Europeans will know far better than I would. There are obviously a great many differences between Europe and the U.S. Not the least of which is, it may not be safe to assume that Europe intends to form a Federal Republic such as our own. From what I can tell so far, this is, at the very least, a highly controversial issue over there, just as our own relationship to NATO is often a topic of heated debate.
But ultimately, the question of democratic legitimacy is an issue of perception of the people of EU member nations. My gut reaction is that I don't expect that the differences between us are such that the question of constitutional legitimacy will be very different. I look forward to hearing about why I might be wrong there, or certainly why I might be right, if that be the case.
Well, thanks for listening. tomorrow I think I'll probably take a look at an argument that the current constitution fails to abide by the guidelines of the Laeken Declaration—that'll take a little further research, since I've never heard of the Laeken Declaration before this document, so if that isn't ready yet, I'll work instead on a 14-point critical summer, which will be very interesting, because it actually includes some of the most compelling concerns I've seen so far. Stay tuned!
And help me out here, folks—I won't learn anything at all if nobody tears my thinking apart!
Looking forward,
Mark
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This is a reply to message # 50283
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| 50439 |
Re:Consitution
Hi Mark!
It was hard to read all your messages but I succeed. I thanks my dictionnary which was an essential assistance.
I visited the two websites you gave me, I didn't understand everything, but we find good arguments for or against. So thank you, I am more enlightened for the vote.
See you soon
quentin
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This is a reply to message # 50204
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