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Complicating and hiding

Wednesday, 27th June 2007

I've only now caught up with Gideon Rachman's column on the EU treaty. It's a must-read; by far the best analysis I've read (Gideon was previously in Brussels for the Economist and knows how the EU works). It's sub only, I fear, but this is the gist of it:

EU leaders began their meeting with a constitutional text. Then, over many hours, they added endless footnotes, protocols and “clarifications”, which became more important than the original text itself. The result is almost impossible to read or understand. And that is entirely intentional. Many things happened at the summit. But perhaps the most important was that the EU finally abandoned the idea that it wants ordinary Europeans to understand what it is doing.

The abandonment of “transparency” brings the EU full circle to where it began when the idea of writing a constitution was dreamt up six years ago. Back then it was conventional wisdom that one of the Union’s biggest problems was that European citizens found it so hard to understand. Why not simplify the complex mess of interlocking treaties and incomprehensible language into a single, readable document?

Big mistake. It turned out that once Europeans were told what the EU was really doing, they were often horrified. The new, admirably transparent constitution was rejected by large majorities in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005. It was as if a manufacturer of tinned meat had suddenly decided that it would be a good idea to put a large notice on the front of the tin, stating: “This product contains reconstituted cows’ udders.” How surprising and hurtful that sales should fall as a result. What the EU decided to do at the summit was to put all the stuff about the repulsive ingredients that make up the Union back into tiny print on the side of the tin – or, in this case, into footnotes to the constitution.