(By Thomas Wallgren; Translated from the Swedish by T. P. Uschanov)

But the potential competition between our EU identity and our Finnish identity does not prevent the EU constitution from clearly shaping our identity. The process has in fact already begun, and the developments are now going further in giant steps. The conclusion is clear: the EU constitution is identity-shaping in the same way as the Finnish constitution.

(iii) The third dimension of the constitution is its role in decreeing identities. Does the EU constitution have a significance in this, and if so, what is it? This is the most important question in the discussions around the constitution.

We cannot know today how it comes to pass. There is namely a difference between success and failure in decreeing, or in constituting something new. But what is clear today is that the EU draft constitution involves an attempt to decree a new collective identity for us EU citizens. The struggle to decree the EU as a new, symbolically charged political community of values is in the draft constitution expressed very strongly by the emotional, pompous introduction; by the provisions concerning constituting, values and aims in the first part; by the incorporation of the so-called basic rights as a part of the constitution; and by the astonishing provisions concerning the common symbols (flag, currency, hymn, motto, national day…) in the fourth part.

It is just this decreeing streak of the draft constitution that is its principal novelty compared to the existing decrees of the EU. The motivation behind the novelty is easy to understand and in principle I see it as welcome. The EU can namely be described as an attempt to create a new political community. The aim is that the new ”post-national” community should be better than the old nation states in answering two crises which have been trying us.

The first crisis was constituted by the wars between the European nation states. If nation states, and the patriotism which they incite, lead us to war, then we must create a new kind of political community which lays the groundwork for peaceful relations. This thought was the primary source of legitimation for the EU for decades after World War II, and the thought of the EU as a ”project for peace” still has a certain role in the debate today.

The second crisis is more recent and it concerns the relations between democratic politics and the globalized economy, or to quote the late Georg Henrik von Wright, the relations between politics and the ”technosystem”.

The idea that the EU can give an answer to both these crises is probably the most important cause of the support the EU has received, not least among intellectuals. The question is whether the good EU that we need corresponds with the real EU which we are about to get.

In order to succeed in its identity-decreeing task, the EU constitution should be different from its member countries’ constitutions in two ways. It should renounce the potentially belligerent elements which often characterize the constitutions of nation states and their political history. And it should create instruments of power which could serve a democratic, political control of the globalized economy better than the instruments we have today. The existing draft constitution of the EU is regrettably a failure in both respects.

The draft is deeply mired in the kind of patriotic-nationalistic thinking for which the constitutions of the member countries have been criticized with good reason. The anchoring to this kind of thinking is expressed, among other things, by the references to specifically ”European” historical achievements in the ceremonious introduction and by the exclusive, non-universal language in the three first articles in the first part of the constitution. My biggest worries concern Article IV.1 about flags, hymns and other symbols of the EU, especially when it is read together with the articles (e.g., I.39.2 and III.194.1) which talk of the union’s ”strategic interests” and the other articles which call for internal loyalty and shared military capacity. Through these provisions, and similar ones which I cannot here discuss in detail, the dream of the EU as a project for peace is in danger of sinking.

The EU constitution does not struggle consistently to abolish the structures in our political tradition that have during our history shown their lethal, belligerent character. Instead the constitution shows the way towards new oppositions between Us and Them. While the problem used to be the threat of new wars within Europe, e.g., between France and Germany, the draft constitution prepares the way towards new conceptions of the enemy; for tension, conflict and in the worst case terrorism and war between Us and Them, between ”Europe” and the others - Asians, Russians, Arabs, Africans, Americans - who do not belong with us.

The promising ambitions of the EU have therefore gone off in the wrong direction when examined in the context of security policy.

The draft constitution is regrettably also flawed in five ways as an answer to the challenge which the new globalized economy confronts us with. The constitution gives economic definitions of the aims of society greater prominence than the constitutions of the member countries or, for example, the charter of the United Nations. Second, it does not authorize the EU to act in the areas where it is most needed; in other words, it does not give it powers to decide upon minimum requirements for the control and taxation of capital. Third, it gives the point of view of commercial policy an increased dominance over other points of view in international politics. Fourth, the draft cements the monopoly of initiative of the commission in legislation and its leading executive role. The privileged if informal position of the financial and industrial lobby in the power hierarchy of the EU is also thereby cemented. Fifth, the second part of the constitution, which deals with the rights and freedoms of citizens, draws a distinction between principles and rights which gives social, economic and cultural rights a weaker status than the classical freedoms.

All five weaknesses cause the EU not to have the means to give the politics of globalization the additional democratic steering towards aims other than economic for which many of us are yearning.

A third aspect of the EU constitution as an identity-decreeing project is the following. The draft constitution of the union does not contain the clause which is most classic and central for the modern democracies: the clause that all power belongs to the citizens. The technical explanation is that the EU receives its authorization from the member countries, not from the people. But the excuse rings hollow, not least because it is the own institutions of the EU, especially the commission and the Court of Justice of the European Communities, and not the member countries that have the right in unclear cases to decide which powers belong to the EU and which to the members.

In the absence of the classic introductory clause, the EU draft constitution undermines the democratic conception of citizens as the bearers of state power and reverts to the older conception of the state as governing its servile subjects.

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