Region-state

Eurocrats probably thought this would be a breeze: write up a Constitution for the European Union, have this supported by all the major political parties and get it ratified in each of the individual member-countries.

This was, after all, a project that comes as a logical continuation of everything that has been accomplished in terms of European integration: the open borders; the common social policies; the establishment of a European Central Bank and, yes, the adoption of a single currency for nearly all the member countries (with the exception of Britain).

When the European Union was a smaller grouping, integration was efficiently managed by a large bureaucracy based in Brussels. A European Parliament has long been in existence in the French city of Strasbourg.

Substantially, the European Union has become more than a common market long ago. It has become a region-state.

That European achievement of a region-state has been looked upon as a model for other regional integration efforts elsewhere, most notably by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

In this epoch of profound globalization, the classical nation-state was seen as increasingly obsolete and bound to go the way of the ancient city-states. Nation-states were too small to manage the large currents of the global economy, too puny to resist the forces of speculation and instability as we saw in the great Asian financial crisis of 1997.

Here, in this corner of the world, a lot of thought has been given to, for instance, building a common currency pool to fend off speculation or creating a common fund to help alleviate indebtedness and poverty. These are all excellent ideas. But they trip on the question of a commonly recognized political authority to administer it, to make policy and to arrive at binding decisions that might be adverse to individual countries in the short term but beneficial to all in the long term.

The Eurocrats, given the comparatively more advanced level of integration they have achieved in that continent, thought that a European Constitution would accomplish the development of common institutions of rule and a single source of sovereignty. If member-countries of the EU could convince their constituents to abandon national currencies, the Eurocrats thought, it should be immensely easier to convince them to ratify a document that espouses the same democratic ideals already contained in the existing national constitutions.

But something went wrong along the way. What was logical is not necessarily practical.

The French, in their referendum held May 29, and the Dutch, in their June 1 referendum, rejected the European Constitution. Those outcomes shattered the whole project.

Remarkably, the ruling Republicans and the opposition Socialists jointly campaigned among the French voters for ratification. Germany’s chancellor and Spain’s prime minister made last-ditch appeals to the French voters to help win ratification. A great show of solidarity, but it was not enough.

French and Dutch voters, by a significant margin, voted against ratification not because they disliked the European Constitution but because they disliked the governments they had. This is pretty ironic since the European Constitution should allow citizens a means to override the failings of their own national leaders.

The French voters who said no to the European Constitution wanted to embarrass their president Jacques Chirac, blamed for the high unemployment rates plaguing the French economy. The French have no means to replace Chirac until his term ends about two years from now.

The grand project of creating a single Europe floundered on the shoals of voters making choices for parochial reasons. That is nothing new. Everywhere else, voters consider large propositions through the prism of local concerns. All politics is local.

There is nothing new, as well, about citizens blaming economic integration for the misery they feel – even if that misery is due to local failure and could, in fact, be relieved by greater integration.

The large project of creating region-states now seems forbidding.

Those who look at a longer horizon, who plot large trends and anticipate future developments will quickly understand the need to create new forms of governance that operate across national boundaries. They will understand, for instance, the need for a common currency or a shared fund for currency stabilization as well as the need to have a political mechanism for administering such things.

But these concerns are many times removed from the daily concerns of those who must eke out a living in circumstances that seem increasingly adverse. If the factory they work for shuts down because it has become obsolete or uncompetitive, it is easy for the displaced to blame an imponderable evil called "globalization" for his sad fate.

French citizens were once most hopeful about the abundant possibilities of a united Europe. In the last campaign for ratification of the European Constitution the French Socialist Party brazenly tapped into the undercurrent of disdain for the US by describing a unified Europe as a forte face aux Estats Unis ( a strong force in the face of the United States).

Even that highly emotive pitch failed.

The results of the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution will not end the integration process. It has moved too far ahead to be reversed. But the forward motion will be slowed.

The European Union is now a much larger community, including the eastern European nations that used to be part of the former Soviet bloc and even the predominantly Islamic nation of Turkey. Much work has been put in harmonizing social, fiscal and monetary policy. That work will continue to be challenging.

The work will be even more challenging as new lines of diversity appear and must be addressed without a proper constitutional bedrock for policy-making. Europeans are pretty comfortable with the Union but are disenchanted with the relative stagnation of the mature economies of the continent.

The other regions seeking to evolve the equivalent of the European Union, some by beginning from the political end of the process, must not be too confident that the grassroots voters who will ultimately ratify any new form of transnational governance will appreciate the premises for integration often taken for granted by the technocrats.