By the end of this year, when Americans know who their 44th president is, Europeans will know who the first president of Europe will be. In December, government leaders of the 27 European Union member states convened in Lisbon to sign the EU Reform Treaty. This treaty of 76,250 words is a rewrite of the EU Constitutional Treaty, which was rejected in 2005 by referendums in major European countries. However, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the author of the reform treaty, pointed out: "The substance of the constitution is preserved. That is a fact." This was confirmed by former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the author of the constitution, who acknowledged: "The proposals in the original constitutional treaty are practically unchanged.
Observers of the global judicialization of politics have noted the spread of constitutional courts around the world, which made their appearance in early twentieth-century Europe and became seemingly required practice thereafter in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The paradigmatic power of these courts is constitutional review, in which a court evaluates legislation, administrative action, or an international treaty for compatibility with the written constitution. The authors begin with a review of the recent literature on constitutional review and judicial lawmaking. They then describe the evolution of some of the around the world, both as provided by constitutional texts and as exercised in practice. They conclude by speculating on the tension...
Guess who's in the doghouse in Europe? French President Jacques Chirac, that's who. France is scheduled to vote May 29 on the European Constitutional Treaty, the latest step in the process of European integration. The Constitutional Treaty is something of a hybrid: more than just the latest international treaty binding the countries of Europe, less than a full-dress constitution creating the institutional architecture of a single sovereign state. It's also about 70,000 words long, which means it is not exactly popular reading matter.
When the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution failed in late spring 2005, Luxembourg held the rotating presidency of the European Union. What ensued in the following weeks and months was an unprecedented plunge into Euro-pessimism, as much among leaders and decision makers as among the wider European public. The most notorious myths about European integration concern migration, the European social model, and the constitutional process. A second set of myths about European integration concerns the Constitutional Treaty, which has been criticized for enshrining a neo-liberal economic ideology that allegedly undermines the elaborate social justice systems of many European countries. Regaining the public's confidence in the European integration process remains an uphill b...
The European Constitutional Treaty, which French voters recently rejected solidly and Dutch voters overwhelmingly, is a truly unlovely document. But the project underlying it is not. And while the treaty is, in effect, a dead letter now, reports of the demise of European integration are greatly exaggerated. Those who have been celebrating the results in France and the Netherlands as deliverance from the European "superstate" are about to learn that in opposing this "constitution," they were not opposing enough. The failure of the constitutional treaty will not, in fact, cause the disintegration of "Europe" and a new dawn for its component nation-states. And those who mourned the failure of the Constitutional Treaty as the end of the European dream are overstating the damage to the cause...
PARIS - On New Year's Day, with the accession to membership of Romania and Bulgaria, European Union expansion ended, certainly for a considerable time, and possibly for good. It has been conventional in EU circles for many years to identify expansion with progress, or as inseparable from it. That's why the French and Dutch referendum rejections of the EU constitutional treaty were such a shock to the Commission in Brussels. The truth is otherwise. Thus it is essential to redefine European "progress," by addressing the necessary choice about what the EU should become.
Last Thursday, the heads of government of the 27 member states of the European Union convened in the Portuguese capital Lisbon to sign the EU Reform Treaty. That "Treaty of Lisbon" is almost identical to the European Constitutional Treaty, the so-called EU Constitution, which was rejected two years ago in referendums in major EU member states. The EU rules stipulate that treaties only become effective when they have been ratified in all 27 member states. The "no" votes in the 2005 referendums killed the constitution, which would have transformed the EU from a supranational organization of 27 sovereign member states into a genuine single European federal state with 27 provinces. It was clear from the outset, however, that the peoples of the various European states were not willing to ren...
VENICE - Europeans, chastened by French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitutional treaty, are receiving much well-intentioned advice from American specialists and officials on what Europe needs to do, and some righteous pronouncements of the European Union's impending demise. Europe is "history's has-been," says Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post. It is "slowly going out of business. ... It isn't a strong American ally, not simply because it disagrees with some U.S. policies, but also because it doesn't want to make the commitments required of a strong ally.
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