Toward A More Perfect Union

Stop ignoring the E.U.!" those pleading, almost desperate words shouted out from posters that until recently were plastered throughout Sweden. They're part of the "E.U. Relay," a government-sponsored campaign that's crisscrossing the country to promote discussion about the European Union's future. But the vast majority of Swedes couldn't be bothered to talk about it. When students from Carlforsska High School in Västerås in central Sweden approached people, they would flee at the very mention of the E.U. "Many of them we almost had to chase," says Kristina Alpfält. "They were suddenly in such a hurry when they heard what we wanted to talk about."

The E.U. has been having this effect on people for roughly a half-century, but this time there's so much at stake that people really ought to pay more attention. At the end of this week, E.U. government leaders will meet for a summit in Thessaloniki, Greece, to accept a draft of united Europe's first constitution. The document has been the subject of emotional yet arcane debate for the past 16 months at a constitutional convention in Brussels, under the imperial aegis of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

Giscard's draft will be considered in detail by member governments beginning next October, but the fault lines are already clear. The United Kingdom vows to continue its fight against what it sees as federalist encroachments on the prerogatives of sovereign states, while integration-minded Continentals will try to bolster Brussels against the power of national capitals. By next June, all member states are supposed to have agreed upon a constitution that puts Europe on track to a single identity — with a President and a Foreign Minister, a European Parliament whose debates matter, and a clearer sense of the E.U.'s now ill-defined responsibilities.

The E.U. wants more clout — so why do so few Europeans seem to care? A recent poll commissioned by Elcano Royal Institute, a Madrid think tank, found that only 1% of Spaniards even know what the constitutional convention is meant to do. In Britain, lurid tabloid headlines like blueprint for tyranny have ensured that people are generally opposed to the constitution, but most newspapers on the Continent have run small articles on the debate.

That's partly because these deliberations have been so arid and technocratic. This constitution is the child of a slow, bureaucratic process rather than a sudden cataclysm. Revolutions provide a highly charged atmosphere for constitution writing (think of the U.S. and, more recently, Poland). Wars will do nicely, too, as they did for the Weimar Constitution of Germany in 1919 and — far more successfully — for the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. Constitutions normally mark a reshuffling of the deck for a society that knows it's in dire need of new governance — or of governance, period.

Not this one. The driving force behind the new constitution is the need to rationalize some of the E.U.'s 29,000 pages of legislation and streamline its byzantine bureaucracy and decision-making processes before it becomes even more bloated as 10 new members join next year, with others bound to follow. No wonder grandiose comparisons to America's Founding Fathers sound forced. "Our work compares favorably with that of the Philadelphia Convention," said Alain Lamassoure, a French member of the Convention. "They were 13, but we were 28, and they could solve their British problem using methods that we currently deplore."

Unlike America's founding document, the new draft constitution did not follow a crisis, but it may yet cause one. Not all of the eight countries that have promised to submit the final document to referendums are sure to approve it, and E.U. officials can't say now how they would handle a no vote. If it passes, the constitution could bring the E.U. up from an abstraction and into the consciousness of every European. But to really make a difference for ordinary citizens — the people who run away when the E.U. is mentioned — the constitution has to answer three key questions about what the European Union is, and what it should become.