the travails of Giscard d'Estaing

Somewhat lost in the news of Saddam's capture was last weekend's other big story: the collapse of the EU constitutional convention.

The leaders of 25 current and future members of the European Union failed to reach agreement on Saturday on a draft constitution, stumbling on a problem familiar to Americans: how to apportion power among large and small states.

At issue was a proposal to discard a voting system agreed upon three years ago that gave Spain, a member of the union, and Poland, which joins next year, almost as much voting weight each as Germany, which has more than twice the population of either. Spain and Poland insisted on retaining the expanded rights.

The irony is delicious: three years ago our European betters were scoffing at our electoral crisis. Now their grand political union is being thwarted by issues some EU apparatchiks consider “minor”—as if assigning votes to national governments is a small thing.

But as London's Telegraph notes, the idea of European political unity is still very much alive, and indeed is largely unquestioned.

Extraordinarily, the summit did not fail over an issue of principle: no one was objecting to the supremacy of EU law, or the creation of a European criminal justice system, or the huge increases in power for the European Commission and Parliament or, indeed, the very fact of having a European constitution. …

This process had seen an astonishing - indeed, almost sinister - agreement on the broad picture. Everyone agreed that the EU should cease to be an alliance of states bound by international treaty, and become instead a single polity with its own constitution.

The rest of the Telegraph article is useful if (like me) you are a bit foggy on how European unity has developed since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Guardian offers an analysis that, although solidly pro-union, is fair enough to discuss worrisome aspects of the proposed constitution.

The draft skeleton of the new European Constitution set out everything, from an official anthem to policy on outer space. Among those at the table - all members of the Presidium, the inner circle drawing up the document - was Britain's representative, the German-born Labour MP Gisela Stuart. She read it with alarm. …

Like a good pro-European, she kept her concerns mostly to herself. But one weekend, sharing a train home to her Birmingham Edgbaston constituency with neighbouring MP Tony Wright, she confided her frustration that the Presidium had been hijacked by ideologues, rather than genuinely reflecting citizens' wishes. Wright said her doubts were too important to conceal: as an executive on the Labour think-tank the Fabian Society, he offered to publish them.

The result was the hand-grenade tossed into the Government's Europe strategy last weekend. In her Fabian pamphlet, Stuart laid bare her frustration with the way Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the famously stubborn French ex-president who chaired the process, steamrollered through a deal.

One crucial paper on defence was dumped on Presidium members for agreement, close to midnight, in French with no translation: a controversial clause diluting national vetoes over EU decisions was sprung on her 20 minutes before she had to catch a plane.

Yes, those famously multilateral French.

I've written a very little on this topic here. Steven Den Beste, on the other hand, has written a lot, including this on how the very structure of the EU is designed to be profoundly anti-democratic.