Comments on: Willful ignorance

By: tapety

tapety — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 21:57:03 +0000

Mein Hobby ist es Gästebücher zu besuchen. Das ist immer ganz interessant und widerspiegelt so, was die Leute im Internet wirklich denken. War auch interessant bei Dir ! Bis zum nächsten Mal. All The Best OfNew Year. Sorry for my english i’am from Germany.

By: Lurker

Lurker — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 22:53:03 +0000

The most important thing you need to know about a constitution is its legitimacy. The US Constitution is held in such high esteem among US citizens, that it is virtually a civic religious cannon. I don’t think many Europeans understand that. Remember all of the complaints from Europe about the 2000 election fiasco, with all the lawsuits and everything? Somehow, their argument was that this ‘constitutional crisis’ damaged the legitimacy of the US election process and the US government. Could they have gotten the picture more wrong? So, whatever the EU does. If there is no buy-in from the citizenship, they’re doomed to fail. Maybe they don’t need to look at the US Constitution as much as it’s process of adoption. Sure the elites fashioned the whole thing, but much of the debate was public. Where are the EU’s Federalist papers?

By: linden

linden — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 04:52:52 +0000

I think there are different conceptions of what a constitution should look like and do at play here. I believe a constitution should clearly articulate the form and function of the government as well as articulate fundamental rights. Anything more particular such as who can or cannot spray for mosquitoes or, in the case of the proposed EU Constitution, requiring the government to provide job placement assistance does not belong in a constitution so much as it should purely be part of the body of law. A constitution should be for the ‘big stuff’ not for scribbling all over with regulations on mosquitoes and job assistance. ANyway, I think we can all agree that the proposed EU Constitution is a bloody mess, a nightmare of beaurocratese. I also dislike how the constitution-drafting sessions have been performed far away from the public’s eye. They should be more open to the public about such an important topic.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 12:38:14 +0000

Back40: You’re reading more into Will’s article than is there. His critique rests on two points: first, that the only acceptable model for a constitution is the USA, and second that the European Union hasn’t considered matters which they in fact have considered. Both are ignorant, and don’t give support to any more sensible critique.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:09:24 +0000

Y’know, I should think it would be better to argue the opposite point from Safire. Europe has far more experience writing constitutions. Look at the French. They’ve had – lemme think – something like seven of them since the revolution. Germany’s been through two since WWI, and the Belgians – the core of the Eurocracy itself – just rewrote their constitution in ‘89. And what has America done in that time? Why, kept the same constition, with only a handful of fairly technical changes since the 14th amendment. Hardly any important textual changes at all in 150 years – just Supreme Court rulings. I should think it’s America that’s out of practice.

By: back40

back40 — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 06:19:28 +0000

That makes perfect sense. If it’s good enough for Alabama it’s good enough for Europe, no need to pay any attention to the crufty old US constitution.

By: micah

micah — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 05:03:44 +0000

Sorry—the Economist article is available here.

By: micah

micah — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 04:58:00 +0000

While Will is lecturing the EU, maybe he should turn some of that righteous skepticism on constitutions a bit closer to home. Consider Alabama’s. This from the Economist: bq. At well over 300,000 words, [the Alabama constitution] is longer than “Moby Dick” [not to mention A Theory of Justice!] and 40 times the length of the US constitution. The 1901 document itself accounts for only about a tenth of this. The rest comes from some 700 amendments, which are appearing with increasing rapidity (52 in 2000 alone) . . . Many of Alabama’s changes have nothing to do with the basic framework of government. Three amendments permit counties to spray for mosquitoes; two permit poultry growers to levy a tax on each hen sold in the state; one allows the Alabama Music Hall of Fame to buy CDs. The constitution is not so much a founding document as a sort of constitutional preamble to hundreds of pages of rules. So much for the “older, wiser, better” argument.

By: pathos

pathos — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 04:16:55 +0000

The true example here should not be the Constitution, but rather the previous Articles of Confederation, which is what the EU is trying to model itself on. Unfortunately, the AoC adequately demonstrated that a government cannot succeed as a government of governments. The only appropriate object of government is people. The brilliance of the Constitution was that it hardly gave the federal government any power over the states at all (that changed somewhat, and for the better, after the Civil War, of course.) The European Constitution—if ever adopted—will be unlikely to last much longer than the AoC, since it purports (to the extent it purports anything) to have authority over other sovereign governments. Before long, one of the sovereign governments won’t play nice, and the whole thing will fall apart. The problem with the concept is that the all-time best example of a government of governments in the UN. And, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with many of the positions the UN has taken, you can hardly think it has, over the past 50+ years, been effective.

By: back40

back40 — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 03:51:08 +0000

Will’s criticisms of the EU draft constitution are pretty standard. The failure to coherently deal with assignment of powers (competences) is easily demonstrated by the inability of those who were involved in the convention to explain the text. The 200 pages of bizarrely detailed text is full of contradictions where rights seem to be granted in one place but are taken away in another or only apply to selected citizens. Cohesion wars with subsidarity, taxation and foreign policy are unresolved – in short, the task of writing a lasting constitutional settlement was botched. Instead it is makes things less clear and more likely to be a continual point of conflict and revision. It’s just a draft, it is possible that much of the document will be binned leaving a distillate that is worthy, but likely that the current draft will just be tinkered up a bit and become another French periodical. Will’s comments are not uninformed. They aren’t original and may even be a tarted up rewrite of an old Economist article. Will may be uniformed but his article is pretty much standard middle of the road criticism you can hear all over Europe but especially in UK. Some speculate that this ambiguity and obvious inadequacy are intentional, that it is not politically feasible at this time to establish a proper constitution and that the current seriously flawed effort can be modified bit by bit in a quasi stealth mode by bureaucrats after all have become too fatigued to think about the issue any longer.