The draft EU Constitution is gradually making its way back into the headlines now that a number of efforts are underway to revive the dead document following the decisive French and Dutch rejections in 2005. Yesterday, I attended a presentation by Professor Alfred Pijpers, senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, who had an insider's perspective on the European constitutional debate.

Pijpers began to outline what in his opinion had contributed to the failure of European political integration. An interesting start as it presupposed that such failure needed to be rectified; it established political integration as a worthy goal. National diversity was the obvious one, but the success of economic integration among EU members has actually strengthened the nation state (think of wealthier nations), and thus paradoxically weakened European political integration. Other factors continued to be the expectation that NATO remains the vehicle of choice for European defense matters rather than an EU force, while the current institutional set-up was according to Pijpers not exactly designed for ‘collective strength’.

All these points, negatives in the eyes of some, serve to underline the original intent and purposes with which the European project was designed, and which in Lady Thatcher found one of its last strong promoters: a free-trading Europe of independent nation states. The draft constitution is therefore exactly the key vehicle for those who want to undo this loosely arranged integration, take it to a political level and satisfy the needs of this new and stronger Europe. How is this justified?

First and foremost there is a need for a unifying instrument that aggregates all the various pieces of Euro-legislation into one comprehensive document, which in and by itself is not an altogether unworthy objective. More contentious however is the attempt to restructure the presidency and unify foreign policy and create two powerful positions that would take care of these rather than continue the current arrangements that rotate power among nations on a semi-annual basis. In order to justify this Pijpers went as far as arguing that a presidency by Slovenia, a nation of some two million souls, could hardly be representative for a union representing some five hundred million inhabitants. One can argue in response that many Euroskeptics would feel much more at ease if European relations with for instance Washington would be conducted from Ljubljana rather than from Paris or Madrid. Lastly, there was the issue of ‘separation of competence’ which required a clear definition of where national jurisdictions ended and European ones started.

All in all these arguments make it abundantly clear that an EU constitution in whatever format is designed precisely to weaken the nation states and strengthen an ever centralizing union. Judging from the reasons as to why political integration has so far failed it would seem that this forced effort to let it succeed could potentially sow the seeds of its own destruction.

It was all strong stuff for the free trading Fraser Institute crowd who judging from some of the questions were not all that confident about this process in a world where regions are increasingly pulling away from political centers rather than veering towards them. I asked the question why there is hardly any debate during general elections about Europe, since the collective vents of anger in France and The Netherlands ended as soon as the ‘no’ ballot was cast. It would have graced these nations if they would have engaged in a constructive debate about what they would want Europe to look like, rather than reject it and let the matter be handled by the very elites that had brought European integration so perilously close in the first place. The answer from Pijpers was that voters could not get all that excited about European issues in national contests and that other pressing issues – pensions, mortgage rate deductibility, crime, you name it – were far more compelling for parties to campaign on and get voter attention.

Somehow that answer left me unsatisfied as it begs another question. Why could the French and Dutch - and the Brits who would surely vote ‘no’ – remain so disengaged about something that they do when directly asked, care about? Are the political parties indeed representative of certain elitist attitudes that prefer not to engage their constituents into a real hard debate about sovereignty? Or are Europeans themselves to self-absorbed to prefer short-term economic questions over long-term political ones? Most likely both and although my question wasn’t answered Pijpers’ lecture made it very clear that the forces that want to see a ratified EU constitution have a very good chance at prevailing, with or without voter input.