It’s another Europe but Giscard wouldn’t like it

Date: 08/06/06

As politicians and bureaucrats across Europe continue to agonise over the question of whether the Union's ill-fated constitution is really dead or just smells that way, work is quietly but steadily moving ahead on a radical blueprint for an entirely new kind of European Union.

The initiative for a 'democratic refoundation of Europe' is being co-ordinated by the French branch of the ATTAC network, the anti-globalisation group that was one of the prime movers behind the successful 'No' campaign that last year led France to reject the EU constitution.

The group has set up a website (www.anothereuropeispossible.net) where anyone who shares their view that the Union is too 'ultraliberal' and obsessed with free trade can help to draft an alternative EU constitution.

The new text is already well advanced and it is likely to send shivers down the spine of anyone who supports the Union in its current form.

The preamble to the new constitution says that the EU should be "an ecological and social democracy".

To support this aim, the text outlines a series of measures sure to send backers of free trade into fits of apoplexy. For example, the Union should "provide a domestic market without frontiers, but with "fundamental priority" for local circulation of goods and services.

To achieve this, governments should be able to slap increasingly high rates of VAT on goods sold in the Union depending on how far they had travelled to the point of sale - a direct challenge to the current single market.

The EU should also have the right to "tax all external products not complying with the social or ecological standards of the Union".

Elsewhere, the draft alternative constitution tackles the thorny issue of institutional reform and calls for an end to the European Commission's quasi-monopoly on proposing new EU laws. ATTAC activists argue that the Commission today ignores the wishes of ordinary people when suggesting new legislation and acts instead in the interest of European elites that represent big business.

To remedy this, the new constitution suggests allowing national parliaments, the European Parliament and non-governmental groups to propose new laws alongside the Commission.

When it is suggested to him that such a set-up would almost certainly bring the EU's already cumbersome lawmaking mechanisms grinding to a halt, ATTAC France's European co-ordinator Christophe Ventura is adamant. "Perhaps the price of democracy is to do nothing," he says. Ventura nevertheless insists that ATTAC's planned new constitution is no unworkable utopian dream. "The European Union is no longer relevant to peoples' needs. We want that to change," he adds.

Ventura argues that the European Convention, which drafted the rejected EU constitution, failed in its primary objective. Far from preparing a document which reflected the aspirations of ordinary people, "the Convention was a masquerade that brought together an amalgam of European elites and produced a text drafted by EU officials", he says.

It is perhaps ironic then that ATTAC's online convention seems to be running into many of the problems that its real-world 'elitist' predecessor encountered. For example, one of the many discussion fora linked to the efforts to draft a new constitution tackles the thorny issue of whether religious values should be mentioned in the document's preamble.

The original Convention's proceedings had to deal with an almost identical conundrum. And elsewhere, differing national points of view seem to be posing precisely the same sorts of problems for the architects of the brave new Europe as they do for supporters of the existing EU. ATTAC France has, for example, drawn up what it calls an 'ABC Plan' for the Union, a kind of road map that sets out how it thinks the EU should develop. But that plan has already been criticised by German ATTACs for failing to "represent the whole spectrum of ideas of civil society". In other words, the French are being criticised for trying to impose their vision on everyone else. Sound familiar?

But while it would be easy to dismiss ATTAC's plan as the work of a group of perhaps well-intentioned but hopelessly unrealistic idealists, many analysts say it would be a mistake to ignore the text. Observers point out that this group was hugely influential in the French 'No' campaign. ATTAC can take a large amount of the credit for the constitution being a dead duck. Whether or not you agree with the group, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as marginal. Its ideas seem to strike a chord with an awful lot of people. ATTAC aims to publish a definitive version of its alternative EU constitution in early 2007.

The alternative constitution

• End to European Commission's sole right of initiative. National parliaments, the European Parliament and NGOs could all propose laws
• EU could slap tariffs on imports from countries that don't meet Union's social or ecological standards
• Internal system of EU tariffs (using the VAT system) to favour locally produced goods and services
• End to the 'ultraliberal' Lisbon Agenda for economic reform
• Relax EU rules on state aid
• Simon Coss is a freelance journalist based in Rennes.

Article takes a look at the draft of an alternative constitution for Europe, drafted by the French branch of the ATTAC network, which is said to have been hugely influential in the French 'No' campaign against the Constitutional Treaty for Europe in 2005.