When Valery Giscard d'Estaing handed in the manuscript of the European Constitution last July with an expression of "intense happiness," it is said he offered a lettuce leaf to Wukei, the ceramic tortoise that had served him as a mascot of prudence and longevity during the interminable consultation process.
At a similar moment in the drafting of the US Constitution, roughly 200 years earlier, Thomas Jefferson ordered his cook to prepare a pudding of his own devising -- Baked Alaska.
Giscard's Dada-esque gesture and Jefferson's simple pragmatism are symbolic of the gulf that separates the most successful written constitution of all time and the draft charter that the Europeans spent this weekend arguing about in Brussels.
There's another, more fundamental, difference between these two documents. The EU Constitution is expressed in 69,196 words and runs to 263 pages (depending on what language you read it in). The original US Constitution, by contrast, is just 4,608 words long on four pages. One has been the product of 26 plenary sessions, 11 working groups and three so-called "discussion circles"; the other was cooked up by half a dozen remarkable young Americans.
So where did it all go wrong? First, and most obvious, the Americans wrote their constitution in a world turned upside down by war and a revolution. Their historic step was reached through the simplifying necessities of violence and destruction. Europe has spent much of the past 100 years at war, but mainly with itself, and certainly not to declare "the United States of Europe." The only weapons Giscard and his 105 "co-authors" (from 28 countries) have seen during their deliberations have been knives and forks.
Second, when Jefferson, Madison and the rest settled down to invent a nation they were drawing on a century and more of philosophical argument about the proper relationship between the governors and the governed. "We the people," the US constitution's ringing and momentous opening words, are simple and profound. They usher in a system of checks and balances as elegantly calibrated as an Age of Reason clock. The European Constitutional Convention has had too many models to refer to. It is a hodgepodge, an impenetrable potpourri by comparison. Crucially, where the US Constitution just itemizes the citizens' rights against the state, the EU Constitution lists the rights to which the citizen is entitled.
There is no reason why a committee should not produce an elegant, concise constitution. But -- and here's the third difference -- ours is an age of the soundbite, not of great rhetoric. Steeped in the language of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and communicating with a likeminded audience of gentlemen farmers and white colonial setters, Jefferson was working in a tradition of brevity, simplicity and transparency.
Thus, where the preamble to the US Constitution describes its objectives in 52 words, the proposed EU Constitution's preamble drones on for 293 words to little purpose. Leaving aside the inevitable ambiguity of its language, the EU Constitution is attempting the impossible: to communicate with some 500 million Europeans, readers and non-readers, rich and poor, from Lapland to Sicily.
The framers of the US Constitution -- Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams and Jefferson -- were possibly men of genius who were not above mythologizing their achievements. Jefferson later described the Philadelphia convention as "an assembly of demi-gods." But what is now forgotten is that, even with all these historical advantages, the arduous deliberations during the incredibly hot summer of 1787 so nearly failed to achieve the vital spirit of compromise that lay at the heart of the document the 13 states signed up to.
A lot of the political horse-trading was done in Benjamin Franklin's garden, beneath the boughs of a shady mulberry tree with a cask of dark beer to soothe and conciliate the hot-heads.
Berlusconi, Blair, Chirac and Schroder will be lucky to find such a mulberry tree in mid-winter Brussels. Giscard d'Estaing and his ceramic tortoise is hardly the 21st century's answer to the benign wisdom of Franklin.
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