A BUREAUCRATIC MESS, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT

Where to file it: Europe's constitutional convention has produced a lamentable piece of work (The Economist, Jun 19th 2003)

There was always a risk that the convention would not design a particularly good constitution. What was harder to imagine was that the convention would produce a text which would worsen the very problems it had been instructed to address. This is what it has somehow contrived to do. In many ways the draft constitution, more than 200 pages long, makes the Union's constitutional architecture harder to understand than it was before. That is an incredible feat. Worse, it weaves perpetual constitutional revolution more securely into the Union's legal fabric. The draft, admittedly, gets one or two things right: it is not entirely devoid of sense (see article). But for the most part the text is sound on points that are relatively unimportant. Everything that is crucial it gets wrong.

The most important task for any constitution is to assign powers while ensuring that the officers and institutions exercising those powers are held in check, accountable to citizens. This central preoccupation is plain in the constitution of the United States. Europe's constitutional convention has barely troubled itself with the question.

It is here that we see why it matters that America's Founders took a rather Hobbesian view of human nature, while the Europeans (really just the French because they're the only ones who matter) take their cue from Rousseau. Consider only the words of Thomas Jefferson, the most French and democratic of our Founders: "In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution." A constitution that doesn't limit the power of the governors is hardly worthy of the name. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2003 6:32 PM