The editorial board of the /World Socialist Web Site/ rejects the constitution on the basis of fundamental, rather than merely tactical, considerations. Whoever votes “yes” is not voting “for Europe,” as the proponents of the constitution state. Such a vote legitimises the bourgeois state, capitalist private property, militarism and imperialist foreign policy. It legitimises a Europe in which the elementary interests of the population are subordinated to the profit interests of the major corporations and banks.
Among the basic principles laid down in the constitution are “an internal market where competition is free and undistorted” and “a highly competitive social market economy.” This makes the domination of the interests of big business over all aspects of social life a constitutional principle.
Such a stipulation is historically unprecedented. The great bourgeois constitutions in modern history—the American Constitution of 1787 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789—do not defend capitalist market relations, but rather “the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.” They defend the social and democratic rights of the individual citizen, not the power or free movement of capital.
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Full text: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/euro-m25.shtml