ninme

The Times - Jefferson: a lesson for Europeans
The US Constitution is 221 years old… hard to see the Lisbon treaty being so successful, by William Rees-Mogg

After a rather fascinating tale of Jeffersonian correspondence on the subject of Napoleonic coup d’états…

Many European politicians have seen the EU as a future United States of Europe, although many of them are reluctant to admit it. The extraordinary thing is that they have not studied the history of the American Constitution. This is like the problem of bishops and Adam Smith. One hardly ever meets a bishop with a student’s knowledge of classical economics. They have seldom read Smith’s Wealth of Nations; they just assume it must be wrong.

In the same way, there are few Europhiles with a good knowledge of late 18th-century American history. Hardly any of the “experts” on the European constitution seem to have read The Federalist, which was written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, and first published in 1788.

In 1825 Thomas Jefferson himself proposed that The Federalist should be adopted as a required text in the University of Virginia. He described it as: “An authority to which appeal is habitually made by all… as evidence of the general opinion of those who framed, and of those who accepted the Constitution of the United States, on questions as to its genuine meaning.” Perhaps The Federalist should be a required text in Brussels and for the European Court of Justice.

ninme nods sagely even though she hasn’t read any of them either

I do not argue that the problems of early 21st-century Europe are identical to those of late 18th-century America. I am not myself a federalist. Yet the Americans did have to face similar problems in trying to reconcile the relationship of the federal government with the individual states - the very questions that confront Europe in the Lisbon treaty.

The American Constitution has succeeded in providing the US with a stable democratic framework that has survived the great changes of the past two centuries, including - in the 20th century - two world wars, a Cold War and a slump. The US Constitution is 221 years old, and still able to produce a presidential election with three highly gifted candidates [err, well...]. The Constitution has repeatedly proved able to regenerate itself.

The original French Constitution was adopted only shortly after the American; within a decade it had been overtaken by the Terror and overthrown by Napoleon. Surely, Europe should be asking this question: why did the US Constitution succeed when the French Constitution has repeatedly failed? There is also the primary question of assent. The articles of the US Constitution were adopted by the Federal Convention in September 1787; the opening words are: “We, the people of the United States…”

Combined with the earlier treaties, Lisbon does form a sort of constitution, though an unsatisfactory one. Yet no one would be entitled to start this European constitution with the words: “We, the people of Europe…” It might have to be: “We, the people of Ireland…”, since the Irish are the only people allowed a vote [hah!]. Will the Lisbon constitution last as long as the American? The answer is probably not.

Yeah I don’t think so. I think it’s rather astonishing, really, that people nowadays go about writing constitutions without looking at, y’know, constitutions. They got the preamble down, at least, and I appreciate that every bureaucrat in Brussels fancies himself a nouveau Jefferson (without the unfortunate character deficiencies, like a tendency towards representative democracy), but there aren’t a lot of successful constitutions in the world so you’d think they’d make a minimal effort to look into the makings of ours…