European Constitution: a New European Absolutism

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European Constitution: a New European Absolutism

Jan Malewski

By revealing that a “No” vote could lead to the seizing up
the mechanism, which seemed well oiled, of the consecration
of a “Constitution for Europe” in some member states, where
it had been thought that the ratification of the treaty
could be submitted to a plebiscite, the opinion polls have
exposed the weakness of the construction of a supranational
state apparatus.

Just think of it, the immense majority of the European party
machines (the Christian Democrats, the liberals, the
Socialists and even the Greens) and of the trade union
bureaucracies (practically all the union leaderships who are
part of the European TUC) committed themselves to its
ratification.

In France and in Holland, governments that were weakened by
recent social mobilisations thought that they could in this
way, a posteriori, easily give a legitimacy to their attacks
on the gains of the working class, while at the same time
winning approval for a regression on the terrain of formal
democracy and of guaranteed social rights. Killing two birds
with one stone.

However...the recent opinion polls in the two countries
where the plebiscite is to take place at the end of May and
the beginning of June are demonstrating the crisis of
representativity of the European political and trade union
structures. That has frightened, and for good reason, those
who had become used to settling the fate of peoples behind
their backs and who, through the “Treaty establishing a
Constitution for Europe” aim to make this state of affairs
permanent.

 From the moment this project appeared, we deciphered its
content and underlined its retrograde social character [1].
We will not go over that again here. But one question
remains: why a new Treaty, which abolishes the preceding
ones (while taking on board their essential content) and
which “establishes the European Union (article 1-1) whereas
this Union had already been “instituted” by the Treaty of
Maastricht, which came into force on November 1st, 1993?

If it was only a question of modifying the allocation of
votes established by the Treaty of Nice - which, it is true,
gave the representatives of certain member states (including
France and Poland) a weight that had bore little relation to
the populations of these countries - did that make it
necessary to “establish a Constitution”? In short, what does
this Treaty aim to ”constitute”?

A despotic European apparatus

The “Constitution” established by this Treaty is in itself a
novelty: it does not emanate from a constituent assembly.
Nor will it be directly ratified, not even by a plebiscite,
by the entire population of Europe, because in the majority
of member states ratification will be indirect. In short, it
cannot be claimed that it “constitutes” a European popular
sovereignty.

The European Union in no way substitutes for the member
states and their machinery of state. It aims to complement
them by reinforcing and rendering permanent a supranational
machinery whose main difference with the existing state
machines is that it is not based on what has traditionally
been the founding principle of bourgeois democracy: the
separation of powers between the legislative, the executive
and the judiciary.

The specificity of this “complement” is that the new
supranational machinery will in certain domains take
precedence over the national state machinery, which does
respect, at least formally, the principles of bourgeois
democracy.

Chapters IV (“The institutions and organs of the Union”) and
V (“The exercise of the competences of the Union”), which
constitute the foundations of the powers of this
supranational machinery, are only clear concerning the
restrictions they bring to the only directly elected
European institution: the European Parliament. This
parliament does not have full legislative powers. Although
it can adopt European laws, it can only do so “jointly” with
the Council (of European ministers), in other words it can
exercise its veto. It isn’t even allowed to have the right
to initiate legislation: although I can block laws, it
cannot propose them. The initiatives remain confined to
institutions that are not directly elected: the Council and
the Commission, in the framework of the “orientations” and
the “general political priorities” that are defined by the
European Council (which is made up of heads of state or of
government).

Furthermore, the Constitutional Treaty makes permanent a
Court of Justice, made up of judges and advocates-general
appointed by governments for a period of six years
(renewable). In 1964, this Court established that the Treaty
of Rome was not “an ordinary international treaty”, but that
it instituted “a juridical order of its own”, and having
done that, it began to create juridical principles which
took precedence over national laws and which were
characterised by the prevalence of the norm. Thus a practice
was imposed in the Union that accorded de facto political
power to judges.

This juridical order - which is in harmony with the
internationalisation of capital and at its service - and its
autonomy are made permanent by articles I-6 and I-38. The
Council can also suspend “certain rights that flow from the
application of the Constitution to the member state in
question, including the voting rights of the member of the
Council representing this state”. Furthermore, a “solidarity
clause” (article I-43) authorises the Union to mobilise “all
the instruments at its disposal, including military means”
to “forestall the terrorist threat”, “protect democratic
institutions and the civil population” or “bring aid to a
member state on its territory, at the request of its
political authorities”.

The term “terrorist” not being defined - and its customary
definition having recently a strong tendency to be extensive
- the “Constitution for Europe” thus contains an article
that can be interpreted as authorising recourse to European
civil war. We should add that if - which is a novelty
(article I60-1) - a member state obtains the right to
withdraw from the Union, this right is not accorded to its
population but to its political authorities.

“Citizenship of the Union”?

The “Treaty establishing a Constitution” does not found a
new citizenship, but confines itself to completing national
citizenship: article I-10 of the Treaty stipulates that “the
citizenship of the Union is in addition to national
citizenship and does not replace it”.

And this complementary citizenship in no way establishes new
or enlarged civil rights: it confines itself to guaranteeing
European citizens “the right to circulate and reside” on the
territory of the Union; the right to vote and to be elected
to the European Parliament (which is not allowed legislative
powers) as well as the right to vote in municipal elections
(but not in regional or national elections: “European
citizens” are thus from the outset unequal among themselves,
according to where they live); the right to benefit from the
protection of diplomatic and consular authorities of a
member state other than one’s own (in cases where one’s own
does not guarantee this “protection” in a third country);
the right to address petitions to the European Parliament
(sic!), to have recourse to the European mediator and to
address the institutions and the consultative organs of the
Union in one’s own language and receive a reply in the same
language. That’s all.

We can especially appreciate “the right” to petition and to
ask questions - we’re going back to the feudal epoch!

So the Treaty establishes a “Constitution for Europe” (and
not “for European citizens”), in other words for a
supranational apparatus which can escape from the risks of
representative democracy. It establishes a “managed
democracy”, which we could also call an “enlightened” or
“tolerant” despotism, that is, a regime in which political
choices are the prerogative of a self-perpetuating elite.

Padlocked democratic states

The analyses that we have published and the debate provoked
by the partisans of the “No from the left”, particularly in
France [2], have largely brought out another particularity
of the “Constitution for Europe”: it “sets in stone
political orientations which ought to be able to be
periodically rediscussed. Once “constitutionalised” these
orientations will not be able to be questioned and will be
imposed on both European institutions and member states. In
this way there is put in place an extremely strict framework
of political decision-making” [3]. In other words, it is not
enough to constitute a European regime that escapes from
democratic control by citizens, it has also been deemed
necessary to establish the limits that can be set on its
future policies.

This policy can be summed up by two formulas, which crop up
repeatedly in the text of the Treaty: “free and untrammelled
competition” [4] and “the exclusion of all harmonisation of
their (the states’) legislative and statutory dispositions”.
The first formula concerns all activities that are a source
of profit. The second covers all the social rights that have
been won in any of the member states.

Neo-liberal policies are thus raised to the rank of
constituent norms of Europe. The supranational European
state machinery - which as we have seen is not even formally
democratic - having not yet (?) totally replaced the
traditional states, and these states (still?) maintaining
control over certain aspects of political life and having to
face the risks of elections, part III of the Treaty (“The
policies and functioning of the Union”) seeks to prevent the
citizens of one of the states from forcing their government
to adopt a policy that could be outside the framework of the
policy decided once and for all by the higher instances of
the Union [5].

So Part III does not, as has often been said, simply include
what was in previous treaties. It completes the
institutional structure of the Union, allowing the survival
of regimes of formal democracy at the level of the member
states, concealing the absolutist character of the European
regime that has been thus established. By so doing it
guarantees cohabitation between this absolutist regime and
formal democratic regimes at the level of the member states,
whose political sovereignty is fenced in by Part III and, in
certain domains, is already delegated to the European
absolutist regime.

In this way the profound democratic regression that the
“Constitution for Europe” represents isn’t obvious to the
citizens, who maintain their democratic rights in their
countries, not noticing that these rights have been largely
emptied of their content. The plebiscites (called
“referendums”) - programmed only in the countries where the
governments have, rightly or wrongly, considered them
“feasible” have an important function in this context: to
give legitimacy to this regression, to give a “civic“ veneer
to the absolutist regime, to found a jurisprudence on which
future regressions can be based.

Absolutism with a democratic façade

The founding of a European state - that would be absolutist
and bourgeois - having been judged too risky in present
conditions, the treaty “constitutes” a hybrid form, a
duality between a formal democracy in the more and more
empty shell of the national states and a “tolerant”
despotism at the level that makes it possible to direct the
major restructuring of European capital that is
indispensable so that the decadent imperialisms of the Old
World can feel strong enough to confront the competition
from the US giant. Since the United States has an
indisputable military hegemony [6], the Treaty also seeks to
found a “common foreign and security policy”.

The setting up of an “Agency in the field of development of
capacities of defence, research, acquisitions and arms (The
European Defence Agency)” represents a step towards the
restructure of military industry to “reinforce the
industrial and technological base” and enable it to become
“competitive” with the US. And to guarantee the financing of
this military-industrial complex that is being reorganised,
the Treaty stipulates that “the member states undertake to
progressively improve their military capacities” (article
I-41-3).

So the Treaty serves to “constitute” a political Europe of
imperialist rentiers. Popular refusal to ratify it in the
member states would put a brake on this attempt. It “would
necessarily constitute a block on (European) political
integration” [7] as it has been conducted up to now.

It would thus open the debate - so far stifled - on another
project of society, on what could be this “possible other
Europe” that is demanded by the global justice movement. We
can understand that this is not to the taste of the
neo-liberal political elites - in particular those of
European social democracy (which, after having dropped any
pretence of a social policy, is now burying its democratic
aspirations - who could be swept aside by such a debate.

- Jan Malewski is the editor of International Viewpoint’s
French language sister publication, Inprecor, and a member
of the Executive Committee of the Fourth International.

NOTES

[1] See in particular: G. Buster, “European Union: at the
crossroads”, IVP n° 354, November 2003; G. Buster, ”European
Union: the Spirit of Saint-Denis”, IVP n° 354, November
2003; Yves Salesse, “Une Constitution inacceptable” ,
Inprecor n° 487, November 2003; G. Buster, European Union:
the Lisbon strategy”, IVP n° 359, May-June 2004; G. Buster,
“European Union: a crisis of legitimacy” IVP n° 360-61,
Autumn 2004.

[2] The following documents are worth looking at: Copernic
Flash, September 2004, “Dire non à la Constitution”, edited
by Yves Salesse (http//:www.fondation-copernic.org); the
booklet published by ATTAC, “Cette Constitution qui piège
l’Europe” (editions Mille et Une Nuits, Prais 2005); the
“Guide citoyen au referendum”, supplement to
l”’Humanité-Hebdo of 9th-10th April 2005; the 4-page
bulletin of the LCR, “Non à la Constitution et à Chirac,
pour une Europe sociale et démocratique”.

[3] Yves Salesse, “Une constitution inacceptable”, Inprecor
n) 487, November 2003.

[4] To add “untrammelled” may seem superfluous. But in
neo-liberal Newspeak this superfluity signifies that the
collectivity must refrain from any regulation that would
make it possible, for example, to impose on a capitalist
conditions that would equalise practices concerning the sale
of goods and services, such as fixing a single price for a
given territory. In the neo-liberal scheme of things, people
living in isolated communities will be made to pay for the
transport of goods and services to them.

[5] It has been sufficiently stressed that any modification
of this Treaty has been made practically impossible.

[6] Of which, however, the occupation of Iraq has
demonstrated the limits.

[7] Quoted from the Socialist Party’s argument sheet in
favour of the “Yes” vote: www.ouisocialiste.net.

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