Hit Me With It One More Time: Giscard on EU Constitution

A lot of people who worry or wonder about where EU democratic ideas are going can look at two stories in today's Financial Times to get a good inkling. In the first, Giscard D'Estaing, one of the primary authors of the EU Constitution soundly thrashed last year in two referendums in France and Holland, makes the following plea:

" France should reconsider the issue - either through a second referendum or a parliamentary vote - after next year's presidential elections."

Let's see, if we change the rules and have a parliamentary vote....Yeah, that's the ticket! We have a corrupt elite that the public despises, we can trust those crooks to vote the Constitution even against the wishes of the voting public! And another immortal line gives evidence that majorities are not that impressive:

"It is not France that has said no. It is 55 per centof the French people - 45per cent of the French people said yes,"

If this sounds wacky, you just don't know the EU and its cadres of faceless unaccountable bureaumeisters. Look at Montenegro, forced to have a 55% majority in order to break away from the Serbian Yugoslav facade. Guess a majority is not enough any more for Europe. Special circumstances.

"There are 16 out of 25 countries that have ratified the European constitution. That's to say there's a qualified majority. There is an agreed text. The concern now is the modalities of adopting it," says Giscard.

Just massage the electorate. And if you think it is simply because egomaniac Giscard is the author of much of the EU text and wants to go down in history as a sort of pseudo-Charlemagne, well, yesss, just like his successor, Chirac, this fellow Giscard[whom I actually met while I was American Vice Consul in Lyon and he was a mere Finance Minister] does have delusions of grandeur. Just like his native pays! But read on:

Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the ruling UMP party and a strong contender in next year's presidential elections, has already suggested a modified treaty could be adopted by parliament.

Like Sodom and Gomorrah, mutatis mutandis, French elites are probably going to get that pesky EU Constitution passed in France, so that somehow the French can predictably claim to be the REAL founders of an EU Superstate. What's missing, besides sanity?

Tony Blair, UK prime minister, had lost a historic opportunity to win a British referendum on the constitutional treaty. "The British will not approve the constitutional treaty. We know it," he said. "I think that for Great Britain we need to find a special arrangement resembling that which applied to the euro."

He hoped the UK would remain in the EU even ifit did not adopt a revived constitution.

"I think the British system of government isthe most competent in Europe. I have seen how British diplomacy functions and the financial systemin the City. All that gives the impression that theBritish system is the best, or at least one of the best, in Europe," he said.

Ah, the Brits! And then there are the Germans [I was once told that Giscard himself is of German heritage, but elaborately faked aristocratic French lineage in his grasping climb of the French elite "montagne."

The former French president also had high praise for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

"I am impressed by the new tone and the new method of Europe's new generation, as represented by Mrs Merkel, which is less strident, less personal, more balanced and works hard on the substance of problems. I hope there will be such leaders in France and Great Britain," he said.

I wonder what he thinks of her predecessor, the ignominious failure Schroeder, now the cushy Chairman of a Russian-German gas pipeline consortium that will ship natural gas west on the bottom of the Baltic Sea from Kaliningrad [formerly Koenigsburg] to Germany without crossing Poland. How's about that for Drang nach Westen?