[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Argument n.1:
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A Constitution should be established by a CONSTITUENT assembly.


A Constitution is not parachuted from the top by the kings for their loyal subjects. It is the NATION itself, precisely here the population of Europe, that CONSTITUTES itself. The assembly thus constituted is called a CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. Its goal: write the constitution, and only that. That is to say, tell the governing people WHAT ARE THE BOUNDARIES of their power.

A constituent assembly is an ELECTED assembly (very important) composed of people who are INDEPENDENT of the existing powers. Why that ? To avoid, precisely, that the governing people do themselves the rules to which they will need to comply. It's common sense ! That's also, accessorily, an heritage of the Revolution.

Once the Constitution is written, the Constituent is disbanded. We don't need it anymore.

But here, the european institutions are ALREADY done, for fifty years, by the politicians of that time (and those, since they were in power, have necessarily been biased : they have until now fixed THEMSELVES the rules to which they should obey, they have NECESSARILY been partial !) These institutions ALREADY FUNCTION, with the low transparency and technocracy we know, presided by the SAME people, or nearly, as those who created them.

And today it would be the SAME people who would establish the text of our Constitution ? No way. A Constitution shall be established by a CONSTITUENT, an ELECTED assembly.

To say that this brave Mr Giscard d'Estaing effectively gathered a work group to build that constitution (that we called the "Giscard Convention") is by no means receiveable :
- Its members have NOT been elected for that (and by the way, WHO elected them ???),
- Its members were NOT at all independent from the existing powers.

In any case, a Constitution doesn't get written by a Convention, but by a Constituent. Read your history books again. What difference ? A fundamental one. They DID NOT HAVE the powers to write that text. This "Constitutional Treaty" is simply illegitimate.

I hope you realize HOW SERIOUS it is : if you don't care about approving an illegitimate text as important as YOUR CONSTITUTION, because you think that what matters is the contents, and that those brave Mr. Giscard and self-proclaimed members of his "Convention" could only have put good stuff in it for your own interest, your reasoning is a POLITICAL SUICIDE. DEMOCRACY is of PUBLIC interest, NEVER LET ANYBODY USE IT ON YOUR BEHALF !!!