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European Union "Constitutional" Lisbon Treaty now ratified by All 27 EU Member States as Czech Republic signs the Lisbon Treaty on November 3, 2009

By Andis Kaulins (all)

An economically AND politically and militarily united European Union will in the course of time become the world's leading power - a development resisted in many quarters.

Yesterday was therefore a great step forward in the right direction with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon as the virtual Constitution of the EU.

Matthias C. Kettemann, an Austrian LL.M. student at Harvard, writes in the Harvard Law Record in We, the People of Europe: How the Lisbon Treaty makes the EU more democratic:

"Today, after the Czech Republic's highest court failed to find any grounds on which it was unconstitutional, Czech President Václav Klaus finally signed the Lisbon Treaty . The treaty's reforms will now enter into force on December 1, 2010. The debate on its contents, however, is far from over."(read the rest here)

From a nation-state point of view, as the German Federal Constitutional Court emphasized in a decision on Germany's then impending ratification of the Lisbon Treaty this past summer, the problem is that the EU is not a federation of states, but rather is primarily a union of 27 sovereign states, a situation which makes unity in economic, political or military affairs extremely difficult.

One could compare this to the hypothetical of 50 sovereign U.S. States each having a governor and a legislature that were more powerful than the President of the United States or its Congress, and each State having its own armed forces, foreign diplomats, etc. It would be chaos, and such a union would be a very weak one, hardly able to withstand modern demands and dangers from without and clearly unable to fulfill the American dream or destiny within.

Seen realistically, it is in fact quite remarkable that the EU functions as well as it does, and the main reason that it DOES function, is that the leading political, economic and intellectual echelons of European countries understand how very important it is to their all ultimate self-interest now and down the road, that the European Union become more solidified as a viable single entity.

How did things get that way in Europe? Essentially, today's remarkably peaceful and economically effective modern Europe - in the past always involved in countless strength-sapping wars - is the direct consequence of World War II and the recognition that things could not continue as they had in the previous eras, where Europe's political life had been largely dominated by the cravings of tyrants, by unfettered lust for "tribal" national power and for unearned stolen prosperity by conquest, domination and theft of others. Something had to give, and it did, as the early very small and loose economic unions, kept together by treaties, evolved into the European Common Market and ultimately into the European Union.

Since its inception, the legal foundations of the European Union and its economic forbears were established by treaties. It is perhaps thus fitting that the "new" de facto "Constitution" of the European Union is also a treaty and not a purely constitutional document as such.

The new Treaty - the Treaty of Lisbon (also called the Lisbon Treaty or the Reform Treaty) - was signed in Lisbon by all of the EU Member States on December 17, 2007 and with yesterday's November 3, 2009 ratification by the Czech Republic, the Lisbon Treaty has now been ratified by all 27 EU States. See the progressive moving map below.

The order of ratification is shown by this progressive map,
starting with Hungary and ending with the Czech Republic.
Source: Wikipedia, by the user Urpunkt

Full post as published by LawPundit on November 04, 2009 (boomark / email).