Vox Polis

It’s one year since the French rejected the EU Constitution in a referendum. And what have our leaders learned?

Meeting last weekend EU foreign ministers decided that their biggest mistake was to call it a Constitution. Not a big surprise there really. But they failed to come up with any real ideas to solve the crisis, except to come back to it next year. As we reported here the Commission is keen to bring back the Constitution, but many leaders seem to want to kick it into the long grass for the time being.

Now i think more than a rebrand is needed to resell the Constitution. Sure calling it a Constitution was clearly a bad move. The 265 page document is not really a Constitution anyway. Usually a Constitution starts with “we the people”…this long document started “the king of Belgium, President of Germany” etc…it is and always will be a intergovernmental treaty.

But to believe that renaming it will fool the voters in France and the Netherlands, is truly unbelievable. No the EU has to start from scratch and rebuild it’s allegiances to recreate confidence in the EU project.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Europe, France, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.