A New Constitution for the Old Continent?

Jean Monnet would be pleased. Charles de Gaulle would be appalled. Tony Blair must feel as if he is being slapped with a Cotswold cow carcass.

On the heels of their squabbling at the European summit in Nice last December, some Europeans are plunging toward writing a real constitution for the European Union (EU)--and possibly even creating a "federation." Various Germans, Belgians, and Italians would like to commission a constitutional convention to write a draft by the time the Italian presidency begins in 2003, to be ready for fine tuning and signing at the next scheduled EU treaty summit in 2004.

One short year ago, it seemed that German foreign minister Joschka Fischer was an exotic maverick when he resurrected--"personally," not officially, as he stressed--the question of the EU's finalité, or end goals. Observers considered Fischer's bolt-from-the-blue appeal at Berlin's Humboldt University for a federal Europe to be an anachronism--a throwback to the days of founding fathers Monnet and Robert Schuman or to the demonstrations in the 1950s by idealistic young Germans for a united Europe to exorcise the continent's centuries of wars. French foreign minister Hubert Védrine complimented Fischer (for, among other things, having consulted Védrine before giving his speech), then deflated any federal fancies and praised instead the dominance in today's EU of intergovernmental action by nation-states over the supranational European Commission. In a noteworthy performance for a neo-Gaullist, French president Jacques Chirac also lauded Europe effusively in the German Bundestag, but he skirted the idea of a federation and focused instead on Fischer's parallel vision of faster integration among an elite avant-garde of existing EU members, while laggard EU members remained behind. British prime minister Blair called for a European "superpower but not a superstate." German chancellor Gerhard Schröder remained conspicuously silent.

To observers steeped in the EU's unique "Monnet method" of rolling consensus, Fischer's summons threatened the familiar system under which Spanish fish quotas are casually traded for Swedish allowances for Arctic farms, or huge subsidies for French peasants are prolonged in return for instituting German anti-inflation canons at the European Central Bank. As long as the finalité of the EU was left unaddressed and vague--and as long as Berlin was willing to bankroll the myriad deals--such horse trading could continue to function. The various European leaders could still stick together while dreaming their different dreams. Yet, once Fischer described his own federal dream and forced others to do the same, France and Germany would clash, however politely. Furthermore, Blair, who already was hard pressed to bring Great Britain into the European Monetary Union (EMU), would have to fend off the redoubled wrath of British Euroskeptics over the dreaded "f-word."

Nice Try

By the time of the Nice summit in December 2000, the incremental pragmatists seemed to have succeeded in sidelining Fischer's grand debate. The adoption of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights included one rhetorical flourish, but this provision remained nonbinding. Otherwise, the 15 members ignored overarching visions and returned to their usual microscopic haggling about whether Poland, after accession, would get 26 votes or 27 votes in the Council of Ministers; how many topics would escape the veto and be decided by "qualified majority" voting rather than unanimity; and just how high that triple-qualified majority would have to be. Settling even those rudimentary decisions proved to be so acrimonious that the European Council spilled over not only its customary 6 A.M. close after the last scheduled meeting day, but into the wee hours of the second day after the expected conclusion.

London may have been pleased with the minimal outcome at Nice, especially because Great Britain managed to preserve its veto on EU tax harmonization, at least temporarily. Madrid may have been happy that its threat to veto admission of new Central European members into the club--should...