WEEKEND EU CONFERENCE IN ROME

This weekend's meeting of EU leaders is going to highlight differences on several aspects of the draft constitution. Notable: voting rules, God, and the powers of the proposed EU foreign minister, as well as the question of what weight to give the existing draft (i.e., how much should it be changed). Read this article in today's Tagesspiegel, and this article in Le Monde.

For some commentary on the EU constitution, see the "brief reader's guide" from Deutsche Welle, and two posts at Crooked Timber (one and two) that are touched off by George Will's condescending editorial about the draft document. See also this critical account of the whole project by Josh Chafetz and Guglielmo Verdirame. I'm not well informed enough to say whether or not I think that the new constitution is a good one. Evaluating constitutions before they're enacted is a difficult business since so much depends on processes of implementation and the political forces that are poised to try their hand at it. And with the EU constitution, you have the additional difficulty (as Habermas and Derrida seem to be thinking of) of the currently doubtful status of the EU as a political community that is supposed to be able to withstand the domestic stress produced by sustaining a common foreign policy, for example.