I don’t think it can simply halt. If it does there’ll be a backlash and it’ll go backwards somewhat.

But some members wanted one and the others the other. We compromised and got both.

I am very glad that we got expansion through before the revolt began. I just hope that the new members wise up fast as to the real costs of membership and start pushing for change.

Now having successfully expanded, I thing the deepening process has come to an abrupt halt. I am a very happy man this week.

How do you measure brokenness?
Germany does know referenda. Nor can you claim that this idea lacks supporters in Germany.

(2) Alle Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus. Sie wird vom Volke in Wahlen und Abstimmungen und durch besondere Organe der Gesetzgebung, der vollziehenden Gewalt und der Rechtsprechung ausge?bt.

All public power derives from the people. It is exercised by the people in elections and referend and by special organs of legislation, the executive power and judical power.

There are just not used in federal legislation. You cannot really claim that the european constitution is an ordinary bill of public legislation.
Germany did limit civil rights for the sake of the EU. Changing the manner of ratification of treaties is small fry compared to that.

Incidentally in the matter of civil rights the constitutional court is expected to rule unconstitutional the extradition directive in the near future.

Significantly or otherwise, a report dated 1 June in the Financial Times about the forthing EU summit in Brussels says:

” . . Mr Blair will be backed by Jos? Manuel Barroso, the liberal European Commission president, who has vowed to press ahead with his programme of economic reforms, including plans to cut state aid and to open up the EU market in services. . . ”

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ffdf2c12-d2c0-11d9-bead-00000e2511c8,dwp_uuid=d4f2ab60-c98e-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html

This saga would be really funny if it were not all so sad. The tale of the massive losses of the state-owned Cr?dit Lyonnais bank in France, diligently accumulated through many years of dedicated incompetence in the 1980s and early 1990s, is the ultimate revelation of what French dirigisme is capable of achieving unaided through imprudent transactions on a truly global scale.

In July 1997, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the then finance minister, said the accumulated losses of Cr?dit Lyonnais were probably around FFr100 billion - or about $17 billion or ?10 billion. Eventually, by one means or another, French taxpayers will have to pay for all that.
http://www.erisk.com/Learning/CaseStudies/CreditLyonnaisCaseStudy.pdf

Something of the flavour of what happened and the fallout for the bank’s staff can also be gleaned from this rather aged, shorter report of 1999, still accessible on the BBC website:

“Credit Lyonnais was once one of Europe’s biggest banks, with assets of $300bn. But it expanded rapidly in the 1990s, buying MGM Studios and other loss-making operations.

“After two years of massive losses, the bank had to be rescued twice by the French Government, after the first rescue package proved inadequate.

“The privatisation is part of a deal with the European Commission, which had questioned the cost of the bailout which it said could reach $150bn.

“The bank has been forced to lay off large numbers of staff, with its workforce shrinking from 72,000 to 51,000 in three years as the bank returned to profitability.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/the_company_file/297004.stm

Just to play the contrarian (and reading a bunch of dumb US commentary on the referendums has got me feeling like the advocatus diaboli from hell), I thought we were all going vive la difference over here and agreeing that excessive harmonization was one of the sins that got the EU into its present pickle. Overturning 50 years of constitutional practice just to suit a bunch of outsiders doesn’t seem the way to go. Tain’t broke.

On the other hand, I can see a good case for having all the ratification procedures within a fairly narrow time frame. One day, two weeks, a month, something like that. No need to dictate how a country ratifies, but practical reasons for doing it all at once. That would have been a substantive change, and a good one.

Well, I am a Latvian, and I think the con-stitution is a disgrace.

The ONLY reason the Latvian Saeima (Parliament) ratified that wretched document is that we have been told by old Europe that the price if re-entry into Europe is acquiescence to the demands of the Franco-German Axis.

Frankly, we want nothing to do with an EU superstate-we would then even lose the tiny voice we DO have and have worked so hard to reattain since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sure, we’ll take your development funds, CAP money and the rest, but we have done a pretty good job since 1991 up until a year ago (when we joined the EU) as it is.

Just give us a common market, and the right for any EU citizen to live and work anywhere within the EU, treat us as equal people, and we will be more than happy with that.

And if those out-of-touch anti-American elite in Brussels, and the unelected hacks with their snouts in the public trough in the Brussels politburo, start making any noises about some EUnuch army supplanting NATO, count us out.

If it came down to us having to chose between the EU or NATO, something that has been talked about in lurid circles within euroland, count us the hell out of the EU. A referendum held in Latvia asking just that: “NATO or EU, but not both”, we would run out of the EU faster than an MEP cashing his or her EU travel allowance check.

STAY OUT OF MY LIFE BRUSSELS.