by William Norman Grigg
August 17, 2005
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"You may have gotten the impression that the European constitution was dead -- that the French had felled it, and the Dutch had pounded a stake through its heart," wrote Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Member of the European Parliament from Great Britain, in the London Telegraph on July 17. "If so, think again. The constitution is being implemented, clause by clause, as if the No votes had not happened."
Since the resounding defeat of the Soviet-style European Union constitution at the polls in France and The Netherlands, three minuscule European nations — Cyprus, Malta, and Luxembourg — have ratified the pact. This means that the EU constitution has now been ratified by 13 of 25 European governments, a fact that Eurocrats haughtily depict as reflective of a continental consensus on behalf of the new mega-state.
Ratification of the constitution by the three mini-states “is a strong signal that a majority of the member states thinks that the constitution correlates to their expectations,” insists European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso. Additionally, notes Hannan, all 25 member governments — that is, ruling elites, rather than populations — have ratified the constitution.
The way that the project of European integration has operated, writes Hannan, is this: “first, it extends its jurisdiction into a new area and then, often years later, it authorizes its power-grab in a retrospective treaty.” The ruling ideology of the EU, Hannan explains, “is thought to be too important to be left to the ballot box.”
August 17, 2005
Email this article
Printer friendly page
"You may have gotten the impression that the European constitution was dead -- that the French had felled it, and the Dutch had pounded a stake through its heart," wrote Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Member of the European Parliament from Great Britain, in the London Telegraph on July 17. "If so, think again. The constitution is being implemented, clause by clause, as if the No votes had not happened."
Since the resounding defeat of the Soviet-style European Union constitution at the polls in France and The Netherlands, three minuscule European nations — Cyprus, Malta, and Luxembourg — have ratified the pact. This means that the EU constitution has now been ratified by 13 of 25 European governments, a fact that Eurocrats haughtily depict as reflective of a continental consensus on behalf of the new mega-state.
Ratification of the constitution by the three mini-states “is a strong signal that a majority of the member states thinks that the constitution correlates to their expectations,” insists European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso. Additionally, notes Hannan, all 25 member governments — that is, ruling elites, rather than populations — have ratified the constitution.
The way that the project of European integration has operated, writes Hannan, is this: “first, it extends its jurisdiction into a new area and then, often years later, it authorizes its power-grab in a retrospective treaty.” The ruling ideology of the EU, Hannan explains, “is thought to be too important to be left to the ballot box.”