When former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing referred to the writing of the proposed EU constitution as Europe’s ‘Philadelphia moment’, he was presumably referring not to the composition of the United States’ constitution in 1787, but to the popular brand of processed cheese. What emerges from the first two months of the year-long negotiations is less a crisp declaration of the rights and responsibilities of free-born citizens, more a soggy mass of indefinite form.
That is not to say that the European manner of writing treaties and constitutions is without method. Its genius is to allow each national leader the space to beat his chest over some patriotic issue, win some small concession, and so give the impression to the voters back home that he has somehow managed to outwit his fellow leaders and create a Europe in his own image. This is what John Major did when he negotiated Britain’s ‘opt-out’ from the social chapter of the Maastricht treaty ten years ago; only for employers later to discover that many of the provisions would in any case be slipped into British law under European health and safety directives.
Now it is Tony Blair’s turn. Nobody should be fooled by the government’s threat this week to use Britain’s veto to reject the entire EU constitution, delivered as is the custom with important announcements not by a minister, in public, but through ‘a senior government source’ (since identified by another ‘senior government source’ as the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw). You can be sure that when the signing ceremony of the EU constitution takes place, Tony Blair will be there with poised quill and broad grin. It is just that he wishes us to believe that he did not reach the table without drawing his sword to defend British interests at every turn.
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