Centerfield

Alabama's state constitution has roughly 750 amendments.

The EU constitution is over 200 pages. I really doubt many people have read it. The document seems to convey an impending oppressive mega-bureaucracy. I wonder if Europeans really understand how much sovereignty they are giving up to the EU, reducing their countries in many ways to defacto provinces of the EU.

Here is a sample sentence, and yes this is a single sentence.
I challenge you to read and parse it!

Article III-228, section 1:
"By way of derogation from Article III-227, the Council of Ministers, acting unanimously on a recommendation from the European Central Bank or from the Commission, following consultation with the European Central Bank with a view to reaching a consensus compatible with the objective of price stability and after consultation with the European Parliament in accordance with the procedure laid down in paragraph 3 for the arrangements there referred to, may conclude formal agreements on a system of exchange rates for the euro in relation to currencies other than those that are legal tender within the Union.

This single greatest obstacle to an EU constitution is that no one can agree (at the national level, where it matters) on what the EU should be. A free trade bloc? A confederation a la the United States pre-Constitution? A federalist union a la the United States pre-1865? A semi-national union a la the United States in the modern era? And, because all proposals to modify the status quo require unanimous support--and the number of members has grown to 25, so unanimity is harder than ever to acquire--this constitution is doomed to defeat whether France passes it or not.

The page count is primarily due to two factors. First, the majority of the EU members have a Napoleonic code legal tradition, unlike the Anglo-American common law system. That means that the mindset is more regulatory than either American or British constitutionalism permits: we like to set out general principles and trust (generally) the judiciary to apply them in specific contexts. The other guys like to conceive of every possible context and attempt to address it verbatim, because their judges are more like administrators than adjudicators.

Second, we've had the benefit of more than two centuries of constitutional interpretation to give our written Constitution legs. (And the British have had nearly 800 years of judicial interpretation of their "unwritten" constitution, if one accepts the traditional beginning of their constitutional tradition at the signing of King John's Magna Carta in 1215.) Writing the whole constitution not only comports with judiciary-as-administrator codification, but also shortcuts the need to allow a few centuries for the constitution to mature as interpretations congeal.

(If one regarded the Consitution of the United States as not just the original document plus its 27 amendments, but to include all the pages of subsequent constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court of the United States, I'd wager the number of resulting pages would be staggering.)

Susan,

The section you've cited isn't that hard to parse. A lot of SEC regulations are much more difficult. (And I bet IRS regulations are worse.) What you've cited only allows the Council of Ministers to regulate euro to non-euro exchange rates in order to achieve price stability by unanimous vote when a) the European Central Bank recommends, or b) the European Commission after consulting the European Central Bank recommends, that the Council of Ministers do so--provided the Council of Ministers consults the European Parliament as laid out in Paragraph 3--even though Article III-227 may be contradictory.

A cynic might argue that the EU Constitution suffers from the fact that it was drafted by European political elites to be imposed on the benighted nationalistic masses. However, those masses aren't so willing to just sell their sovereignty down the river however retrograde the liberal elite thinks that concept is.

It's pretty much conceded that the EU suffers from a democracy deficit in the first place and the Constitution does nothing to remedy that. Moreover, much of the current impetus for the Constitution seems to be to make Europe as unlike the U.S. as possible. To a certain extent, that makes sense--the US Constitution is in some ways designed to remedy the defects that the founders saw in England. But here, that seems to be a lot of the motivation. Or maybe the political elites are more enthusiastic generally about a United States of Europe than the people themselves are--these are countries with ancient histories, not the American colonies.

Please read this:
Building the EU by stealth