Referendum on the EU Constitution

I don’t pretend to understand how the EU, as it currently is, works. Even though I like comparative politics, it’s difficult for my mind to get a grasp on how this system works. It’s confusing because it some areas, the member states seem to retain sovereignty and yet in others, it does not. The area of law comes to mind as some EU laws can override laws made by national legislatures. It makes me wonder how these nations can continue to claim to be truly sovereign.

I was just browsing the various news sources and found two articles about the upcoming referendums in France and the Netherlands where their citizens will be voting on ratification of the EU constitutional treaty. According to the articles, it appears that citizens there are largely apathetic and there is a real possibility that a “no” vote may occur. French President Chirac is expected to throw his support for ratification, hopefully to encourage the people to do the same.

The idea of a constitution for the EU is pretty nice. Having such a document, I think, is almost a necessity. Of course I say this realizing the obvious bias I have for constitutions. After all, I live under two of them. Constitutions are great for laying out how the government works and what the government is limited from doing. So perhaps an EU constitution would help me finally understand how things are operating with our friends across the pond. Not so. It still looks like they put federalism and confederalism in a blender and hit the mix button. It still looks like a confusing bureaucratic monster.

While I was reading about these referendums, I was wondering at what was happening to the U.S. when it was formulating its constitution. Many Americans are unaware that this country’s government wasn’t just formed after Independence. Seriously, stop a person and ask them what they know about the Articles of Confederation and they would say, “huh,” or think it had something to deal with the Confederacy of the Civil War era. In actuality, that was the government before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. After the Revolution, the United States government was formed in which the individual states remained sovereign, kinda like the European states today. Just after a few years, they realized that this was just wasn’t going to work. So a reversal was made in which the federal government would become supreme and this system has been working ever since.

The idea of the citizens in these countries being able to vote on this constitution really caught my attention. Having one state, such as France or the Netherlands, voting down the constitution could be disastrous. If this situation happened in the U.S., I’m not sure our constitution would have passed. I just can not imagine the citizens of a state such as Virginia ever going along with the idea. Up until the Civil War and even decades after it, many Americans considered themselves citizens of the state more than they considered themselves citizens of the country. In other words, my Michigan citizenship means more to me than my American citizenship. If countries in the EU really wanted this constitution, they probably would have been safer ratifying it through their own legislatures.