After French and Dutch voters rejected the EU Constitution in 2005, most nation’s expected the majority ‘No’ vote to mark the end of a shared EU constitution. This appears not to be case. A slimmed down version of the treaty is being created by national parliaments across Europe – by old and new members – in a recovery attempt to initiate a brief and condensed version of the rejected constitution. Potential future prime ministers and presidents are so confident of the new repackaged “mini treaty” that they have begun to sell it to electorates, often without any signs of research or prior interest in EU accession or enlargement.

On Friday 8th September, the current French interior minister, and French presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy, delivered a speech to the Friends of Europe think-tank declaring a revised EU “mini treaty”. His competitor for presidential title in May 2005 is socialist, Segolene Royal – peculiarly, her reaction has been to cancel a press conference in front of Brussels journalists, terrified that they may question her on what she thinks of Sarkozy’s EU mini treaty. While Sarkozy also hopes to achieve radical reform in the appointment of EU Commissioners, and potential restructuring to create an EU Foreign Minister, the most notable reform was of repackaging the already rejected EU constitution. Yet, it is a major concern that the ‘No’ vote in France was so successful precisely because of old socialist yearnings for an ‘anti-free market approach’, voting against the constitution’s third chapter.

Soon after Sarkozy had announced his plans, Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi, has also called for the need “to restart the constitutional project, but in a gradually simplified form.” More worrying is his concern that “the third chapter cannot be approved in its current state.” The major obstacle to eliminating the third chapter is that – although it was the main reason behind the French ‘No’ vote in its national referendum – it is the major part of the constitution which assures consensus on “a free market economic course of action.” That is to say, many of the European nation states still want the EU primarily for its rights, welfare and subsidies yet when it comes to the “free market”, well it just doesn’t suit. Furthermore, it remains unclear as to what Prodi demands from the redress of Chapter III, since that section of the constitution also deals with removing the right of member states to veto EU decisions. However, Sarkozy will readily find willing negotiations for the mini treaty in Italy, as well as with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who is eager not to abandon the constitutional treaty.

What is the problem with a revised charter? After taking stock of the French and Dutch ‘No’ vote, and general antipathy towards the EU from other European nations, we might ask: is a “mini treaty” the next best option? In my own view, this is not the next best step. That is a real ‘No.’ It is similar to the ‘No’ which the French and Dutch voted for in a referendum over the EU constitution in 2005. After having agreed that all Europeans have said ‘No’ to the EU Leviathan, in which all member-state citizens were to submit and oblige to its laws, the next step is not to minimise that ‘No’ and simply recreate the same constitution in fewer pages. The next step is to take stock and realise the consequences of a ‘No’ vote. If we look clearly at the situation that Europe is now in, a ‘No’ vote could be used to every nation’s long-term advantage.

The closure of EU institutions, should have, in theory, been imminent. The ‘No’ vote should have meant ‘No.’ However, rather than guarantee the closure of EU institutions – which would inevitably mean a loss of royal jobs for EU bureaucrats – EU officials have rehashed a new “save the EU constitution/institution project”, in the form of the mini-treaty. Should the closure of any EU institutions be fixed, then the taxes, savings and investments should be averted towards national governments for the purposes of initiating global trade arrangements and multinational businesses within Europe and the wider global network.

An inherent problem with the EU, since its birth, has been that it creates an exclusive preferential trade arrangement for those countries involved. It is not a global organization. It is definitively European. Thus, after the closure of EU institutions, it would be possible for national member states to appropriate the existing taxes and invest “globally” – as each feels predisposed – in order to initiate free (and fair) trade arrangements in other European and global networks. If we followed this plan, countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia and Turkey could still gain from trade contracts and business expansions should the workers in their homelands be truly willing to contribute to the labour-force and their countries truly willing to provide a stable situation in which free market forces can flourish. And neither will excessive migration need to occur, since workers will not be required to migrate, unless such large-scale opportunities prove truly beneficial to each contracting private party.

If governments were to force the closure of EU institutions and use the existing tax to initiate private networks, investment would therefore not be limited to exclusive European networks and nor would it rely on a huge wave of migration from the poorer European countries to the richer ones, both factors of which seem to be continuing to contribute towards global embitterment. In any case, a ‘No’ vote for the EU constitution should not be taken for a ‘Yes’ vote, and a rejected constitution should not be taken as a request for a mini-constitutional framework.