Brussels, 20/07/2004 (Agence Europe) - Under the title "A Constitution without Citizens?", Nicole Gnesotto devotes the editorial column of the last quarterly bulletin (No11) of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (ISS) to the new constitutional treaty and to the result of the last European elections.
Evoking the high rate of abstention, the ISS Director notes that elections are less a censure of a project than of a method that is totally incomprehensible European construction too complex to be effective, too obscure to be liked, and mainly too distant to bring about what is after all the foundation of any democracy: "quite simply the feeling that our votes will make a difference". Ms Gnesotto went on to say that, for those who have read anything of the clauses and provisions over which the ministers and Heads of State have torn themselves apart for the past two years, perplexity is to be allowed as there is a threshold of obscurantism beyond which the most democratic of the diplomatic compromises negotiated between 25 Heads of States also becomes the most unlikely of the political projects submitted to the vote of 450 million European citizens. In the same way as the Iraqi crisis had highlighted a major division between the European man in the street and most of the elite of the 25, also, in 2004, there is an immense majority of European citizens who cannot relate to the institutional convolutions that their leaders now call the European project. In this light, the new treaty is practically unreadable and even the most delayed process of ratification becomes a high-risk adventure, she believes. As voters cannot be changed, European practice must be changed, Nicole Gnesotto says, affirming that it is now necessary to "build legitimacy through action rather than through institutional dissertation". This legitimisation through action also means through a common foreign and security policy in the world which "has rarely been as chaotic and dangerous", the Institute's director points out before concluding with a warning: "In this kind of world, the Union also fails to give concrete proof of its added value, and the best is definitively behind us".
The full text can be found on the Institute's website: http://www.iss-eu.org .
We are publishing in our EUROPE-Documents series today the No2374/2375 which is a summary of the constitutional treaty with selected extracts. The printed version will be published separately.