The absent voice” “

The summit of the Heads of State and of Government, marking the end of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), will be held in Brussels on 12 and 13 December. On that date the citizens of Europe will finally know whether the Union is able to give itself a Constitution prior to its enlargement from 15 to 25 members, already fixed for 1st May 2004. Joseph Weiler , professor of international and EU law at the New York University School of Law and at the Collège d’Europe in Bruges, on intervening in a recent meeting in Rome in which the vice-chairman of the European Convention, Giuliano Amato, also took part, stressed that “a reference to God and to Christianity” in the preamble of the European Constitution “is not only constitutionally acceptable, but indispensable” because such a document “must reflect the European constitutional systems in their unity and in their diversity”. Referring to the lack of any reference to the Christian roots in the draft Treaty presented by the Convention during the Council at Salonica on 19 June, Weiler warned: “it is impossible to exclude the choice” of “countries that represent over half the population of Europe and that have given space to [a recognition of] Christian roots in the preambles of their respective constitutions. If the articles of their national constitutions express norms of positive law, their preambles have the function of expressing the values by which that same law is inspired, as well as the symbology in which the civil community recognises itself”, and “in some way declaring their identity and hopes”. The scandal of the absent voice. Weiler, who calls himself a “practicing Jew”, points out that in the debate on the integration of the continent, “Europe is experiencing a phase of negation – denial as the psychologists would put it – of their own Christian identity”. It’s a “worrying negation because it expresses a wider tendency present in the way that the EU is constructing its own public ethos: that of avoiding what’s difficult in favour of a simplifying rhetoric”. Weiler calls this negation the “scandal of the absent voice”. It ought, he says, to give “both believers and non-believers pause for thought” because “this absence impoverishes us all”. And the blame for it is attributable not just “to a lay concept of the relations between Church and State”: “it is in large part a self-imposed silence”. “It seems to me – he adds – that many Catholic scholars have confused the public discipline of constitutional democracy with a private discipline of religious silence in the public sphere”. A fact that is especially disturbing in view of what Weiler calls the “profundity of the social teaching of John Paul II: texts like Ecclesia in Europa, Redemptoris Missio and Centesimus Annus are rich in suggestions and would deserve to be brought to the attention of the debate”. A “Christian Europe”. “Today – concludes Weiler – we must look to the future. We are mature enough for a ‘Christian Europe’, which is not an exclusive or necessarily confessional Europe. It’s a Europe that equally respects in a full and complete way all its citizens: believers and non-believers, Christians and non-Christians. It’s a Europe that, although celebrating the legacy of the humanistic Enlightenment, is neither afraid nor embarrassed to recognise Christianity as one of the central elements in the evolution of its own civilization”, an incontrovertible historical fact, in response to which “even European Jews ought not to feel themselves less European” because “an important Christian cultural substratum is undeniable in their own ‘European-ness'”. Riviewing the work of the Convention, Giuliano Amato declared that the text presented in Salonica “represents an important change vis-à-vis previous drafts of the Constitution”, in particular “for having inserted into it, and thus raising to the level of constitutional guarantee, the content of the so-called declaration annexed to the Treaty of Amsterdam on the Union’s respect for the juridical status of the Churches, as established in the various member states”. But in Amato’s view, the text is seriously flawed because it places philosophic organizations, “that have nothing to do with the transcendent”, on a par with religious associations.