Preamble is too verbose

[Jakub Jermar]

Compared to the US preamble and also the older draft from the European Federalist Papers, the current draft Preamble starts to feel a little verbose and too detailed, and may already open some sensitive topics which are better left to federal laws and politics later.

As a citizen who sees the draft for the first time and is asked to ratify it, I’d maybe welcome a minimalist version which tells what this is all about and no more. A minimalist version can have the benefit of being equally appealing (or repulsive) to both the liberal- and conservative- minded citizens.

As an exercise, I came up with this example:

We, the Citizens of the several European states, do hereby recognize and
acknowledge certain common interests that make us one People. In order to
secure these interests, we exercise our sovereignty to establish a new level of
free government for ourselves, equip it with sufficient powers and delegate to
it the competences we enumerate in this Constitution.

Now, I am not saying this should replace the current draft Preamble – I certainly didn’t put that much effort into it. I just wanted to present what I consider a minimalist, yet reasonably complete version which avoids unnecessarily idealistic language.

I am looking forward to your thoughts and comments about this.

[Jakub Jermar]

Oops, wrong topic, I copied this under the Preamble topic and this one here can be deleted.

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