Picking Cherries or Dead As A Duck?

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There are opinions to suit all taste this week. According to EurActiv:

EU leaders have almost all declined a proposal by French President Jacques Chirac to save the EU Constitution by splitting it up into single chapters and integrating those into the existing EU framework.

The EU observer puts it more bluntly – The Hague says constitution is ‘dead’:

The Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot has said the EU constitution is “dead” for the Netherlands, rejecting EU leaders’ recent pleas for a resuscitation of the charter.

So it seems, at the end of the day, there will be no low-lying fruit, like cherries, just there for the pickin. Time to start building some ladders I think.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

2 thoughts on “Picking Cherries or Dead As A Duck?”

  1. Maybe a ladder… But some time too. There’s no way anyone is going to make any progress on this until parliamentary elections in Netherlands and presidential elections in France, both taking place in 2007. For the moment we’ll be stuck with this farce of arguing whether the Constitution is dead or not.

  2. But haven’t some already been picked, such as the Council Conclusions on transparency of Council Meetings in December 2005 and the earlier progress on human rights proofing Commission legislative proposals in the light (amongst other things) of the Charter?

    And is this really “cherry picking”? Or is it merely the logical consequences of the longterm commitments in the Treaty of Maastricht to fundamental rights and to transparency – consequences from which the Member States are not walking away?