What is the EU constutition?
Its genesis dates back to the 2001 Laeken declaration, where the then-15 members of the EU decided to amalgamate and update the treaties which governed the European Union, notably the treaty of Rome (1957), the Maastricht treaty (1992), the Amsterdam treaty (1997) and the Nice treaty (2000). Famously, Peter Hain described it then as a “tidying up exercise”. Instead, it turned into a six-year saga which has threatened to paralyse the EU and even end political careers. Certainly, Jacques Chirac’s failure to persuade the French to back the constitution in a referendum curtailed any thoughts he had of running for the presidency for a third time. A commission under the former French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, spent two years drawing up a document which finally totalled 160,000 words and required unanimous ratification by all member states (which in the meantime had increased to 25 with the accession of 10 countries from Eastern Europe). That original constitution would have enshri
