EUROPEAN CONSTITUTION: A MISSED OPPORTUNITY
The men and women who draft constitutions and suchlike may choose to
dress up current reality in a fine show of language or they may choose
to create a new reality by setting forth constituent principles in so
breathtaking and outrageous a manner as to become a template or an
inspiration to people in other places or at other times who seek
reform. The American Constitution may be said to be the prime recent
example of the latter.
In choosing which path to take the creators will be mindful of the
complexity of the reality they seek to describe. If they feel that the
society or civilisation they are charged to classify is itself of so
various and ambitious a nature that they will do well to combine its
many components they may be quite modest in their aspirations.
Thus Europe today: By most standards a considerable success, bringing
peace and harmonisation and a growing prosperity to a host of nations
long divided, its sheer ambition must stultify the creative instinct.
To further such a concept hardly seems possible. The achievement is
itself the success.
And so the Constitution is quite modest in outlook - if not in size.
It states the standard aims - justice, freedom, equality,
opportunity, prosperity...and, oh, the environment - and then gets on
with the nitty gritty of administration and legislation.
But the expansion of the European Idea is itself part of a much wider
reality. It is a Global Reality. The cultural and economic links we
simply take for granted. But, more and more, the success of the
European Idea will depend on events which have no specific European
connection. Projected global warming, projected fuel shortages,
projected water shortages, terrorism, the mass migration of peoples,
the spread of diseases, bio-technology, advances in communication...all
these, and more, will impact on any European future.
Should any of these projections become reality - as more and more
seems likely - our concepts of humanity will be tested as never
before. Do we respond as Europeans or as Globalists? Only the latter
will do. But a response in this global sense will demand of us an
acceptance and an appreciation of the pan-human effort which nowhere
finds a place in our new Constitution.
I advance a theory of Humanisation, this being defined as "The global
free society commensurate with human capabilities". This society, I
suggest, is now emerging across the world. It is a new dynamic, one we
have barely conceived before. It transfers value from the nation or the
deity to the reality of the human achievement since we first walked the
planet. It is not just humanism - though, of course, it has
connections to humanism. It is less an ideal or a belief and more an
appraisal of the capacities we developed during evolution and of the
realisation of these capacities in recent times. Also, it is less
concerned with the quest for freedom and justice and more concerned
with the societies created and the values pursued by those who already
possess freedom and justice. Finally - and most ambitiously - it
sees us as, effectively, "The mind of matter, the eyes, ears and the
voice of the known universe" and suggests that this confers upon us
obligations and a mission as onerous as any we have espoused in the
past.
It is hardly to be suggested that a Constitution reflecting a new
ambitious European reality should enter easily into such matters. But
the challenges facing the new Europe in the near future will demand a
more reflective response that we have hitherto provided. It is in this
sense that I propose the notion that the new Constitution is a lost
opportunity.
Joseph H
www.humanisation.org
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