and there's bad news - Don't mention the superstate in Brussels:
There is an elephant in the drawing room. As EU leaders work themselves up about voting weights, numbers of commissioners and other trifles, they are tip-toeing around the enormous fact that the document in front of them will transform the EU, de facto and de jure, into a single state. On the day the constitution enters into force, all previous treaties will be dissolved. The EU will cease to be an association of states bound together by international accords, and instead become a single polity, with its own jurisdiction, legal personality and constitution. It is the most important development in the EU's 47-year history, yet no one wants to discuss it.It's funny how often that happens when people have made a huge honking mistake.
There are understandable reasons for this. Talking about double majorities and Nice formulae is a way of soothing, if not anaesthetising, the watching electorates. One of the peculiar features of European integration is that it has taken place largely without popular endorsement. National electorates have rarely been asked to approve the successive steps toward closer union; when they have, they have often voted "no". Brussels, accordingly, has tended to agglomerate powers with as little fuss as possible. If the peoples of Europe knew how much had already been conceded - let alone what is proposed in this new constitution - they might shake off the system like a horse shaking off flies.I have a more graphic illustration involving horse by-products and flies.
Thus, despite more than two years of discussion, there has been almost no public debate about the balance of power between Brussels and the nation states. Few people are aware of the clauses that set out the extent of the EU's power: "The Constitution… shall have primacy over the laws of the Member States" (Article 10); "The Member States shall exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has not exercised, or has decided to cease exercising, its competence" (Article 11); "The Member States shall co-ordinate their economic policies" (Article 14); "Member States shall actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy" (Article 15).Sounds like a bureaucratic putsch to me.
There was always a danger, of course, that people might tumble to what was being done in their name.Apparently not much of one. But at least the Sun is on the case.
I can hardly wait for the UN weenies to try the same ploy worldwide with the assistance of the usual suspects. Howard Dean would cream his jeans at the opportunity.
