Dear Europeans,

We are happy finally to present to you a bulletin edition which includes the final Constitution, as proposed by the Convention. Last Friday, in a nice ceremony, the Convention finished its work on the most crucial element of the Constitution, Parts I and II. This special bulletin edition includes the last minute changes to the final text, a briefing on the Convention session as well as first comments from civil society.

Politicians as well as representatives of civil society are finding it difficult to evaluate the result. On the one hand, no one is perfectly happy about the result of the Convention, not even the grandfather of the Convention, Giscard d’Estaing himself. On the other hand, it is also true that the Convention has been much more succesful and democratic than have the IGCs of the past. It has achieved much more than most optimists had expected from the Convention.

But we also have to keep in mind that this success of the 210 Convention members will be worthless if the IGC, which has hardly any democratic legitimacy, dares to open up the result and renationalize the Union procedures.

We as active members of civil society cannot therefore rest on the achievements of the Convention. We need to make a further effort to influence the completion of Parts III and IV of the Constitution. There still remains much work to be done, not least the establishment of qualified majority voting as a general rule for all policies, and the end to vetoes in the Union’s foreign policy. Only these steps can create a Union which will not be paralysed by its intergovernmental procedures. A further decisive point concerns the revision procedure for future amendments to the Constitution: it will be important to ensure that not all revisions to the Constitution (which has more than 350 Articles) will require ratification by unanimity.

The majority of Convention members would still like to see progress made in these areas, so public pressure can still play a role in having these issues addressed when parts III and IV are dealt with in the final Convention sessions.

If you would like to contribute to the next edition of the bulletin, send your contribution to mailto:convention@jef-europe.net (deadline for the 32nd issue is 23 June). As usual, you can read all articles of this Bulletin in full length on the Constitutional Convention Homepage: http://www.constitutional-convention.net.

Best European greetings,

Editor in chief.