Do We Have to Accept Just Any “Constitution”?

The French referendum on the European constitutional is the first vote in which a rejection of the charter could take place. This has attracted the attention of all Europe, as much on the part of supporters of the initiative as its opponents. The Austrian newspaper Der Standard featured two opponents of the proposed constitution who shared their points of view on the French campaign and their vision of the German-speaking world.
The writer Burkhard Muller-Ullrich put himself in the place of a Frenchman when drafting a requests to those German intellectuals who signed an alarmist call in support of a “yes” vote which was published in the newspaper Le Monde. He asks them to change their stance. With what right do they have to affirm that a “no” vote is a reflection of fear when Germany has just denied its people the right to express themselves through a referendum? Why would the rejection of that charter be a catastrophe? In a different style, Austrian analyst Manfred Rotter expressed his dissatisfaction with the alarmist campaign that "yes" parties are orchestrating. He opposes the Austrian decision to ratify the document through the electoral approach. The author views the constitution as untenable and argues that the French should take advantage of the opportunity to reject it.
In Le Nouvel Observateur German intellectual Jurgen Habermas appeals to the French voters directly, more exactly, to left voters opposed to the charter. His reasoning is simple, if one wants to regulate the economy, it’s necessary to establish a political entity able to control it. If it’s better integrated from the political point of view, Europe can be such an entity. Since political integration is the declared objective of the constitutional treaty, it’s necessary to support it. According to Habermas, the neo-liberals would be happy to see the rejection of the document to the extent that its turning down would be harmful to Europe politics. At no time does the author mention any of the language of the proposed constitution to confirm his own statements or to demonstrate that the European Union will have any influence in the future on the world political currents. Habermas later uses the same argument concerning foreign policy, limiting himself to putting neo-conservatives in the place of neo-liberals. The question of the link between that document and liberal philosophy constitutes the central point of the left’s campaign in terms of the referendum. For supporters of the constitution, like Habermas, a “yes” vote constitutes a brake on the excesses of liberalism. Opponents of the document refute that focus. In Le Monde, Maurice Allais, the 1988 Nobel laureate in Economics, denies the “yes” defenders the right to use that argument. Referring to article III-314 of the treaty, Allais points out that the text leaves member states with no possibility to protect themselves from the disastrous consequences of exacerbated free trade. In that same newspaper, a group of social democratic personalities (Jean-Maurice Dehousse, Oskar Lafontaine, Pierre Larrouturou and Cease Salvi) also indicate that the charter, over the long term, is dangerous for the European Union. The constitutional treaty opens the road to fiscal competition between member states at the very moment Europe requires considerable public investments in the research sector, particularly in the area of alternative energy sources which can be substituted for petroleum. The authors estimate that the portending energy crisis will sink the world economy into depression and that a strong Europe endowed with the necessary means to influence in the economy will be then imperative, not a Europe supporting economic liberalism. Within the French right, certain supporters of the “no” vote, such as Philippe de Villiers, have expressed the idea that a rejection of the European constitution would result in a rejection of Turkey membership in the European Union, although these are two unconnected issues. Certain figures of the UMP who support the charter have affirmed that there is no relationship between the issues, which hasn’t prevented a group of parliamentarians from that party from using the same argument in the opposite sense, asserting that a “yes” vote would be against Turkey’s membership in the EU! By accepting the constitution, Europe would build a political force based on the human rights, and that this would be definitively incompatible with the incorporation of Turkey. That idea is based on the notion that Islam and democracy are incompatible. This presupposes that a lay country whose population is for the most part Muslim is above all a Muslim country and, consequently, suspect of being a carrier of the Islamic virus.

Finally, the French media intellectual Bernard Henri Levy is indignant. In an editorial in Le Point he picks up on the The Los Angeles Times, concerning the farcical war on terrorism. How can one believe in the arrests of al-Qaeda leaders at the most opportune moment? However, far from being an indication against the image of the war on terrorism that the Bush administration presents or against the existence of a true world Islamic conspiracy, the farce represents to the author an opportunity to conjure up his own thesis on the existence of a link between Ben Laden and Musharraf. Without questioning the good will of Washington, BHL calls on his readers to distrust Pakistan that, according to him, this willing one to hand over the atomic bomb to al-Qaeda.