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Hi - excellent initiative! I look forward to contributing a lot to it, hopefully with the help of many other European citizens.

Some comments/questions on my part:

different draft texts

I have added a thread based not on the currently rejected text, but on the draft published by The Economist Magazine in 2000. While it is way too Eurosceptical for my taste, it does give a good example of what a really concise, fundamental and readable constitution could/should look like. I propose to develop a new text on this short proposal and stick to its limit of 4000 words.

The reason is that I think the currently rejected text is beyond repair. In trying to consolidate 4-5 different treaties, it has become way too long and too complex to ever serve as an inspiring document for the European peoples. Offering only that version for modification will lead to this project erring on the same side as the original draft text - if you can persuade people to wade through all these versions at all. I don't propose to take it away, but I do assume we can also work on the basis of other draft texts

The feeling of many people at the recent wikimania meeting - http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimania05/JH1 - was that starting with the rejected text is a bad idea, best to start from scratch. Boud 12:18, 17 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Don't worry. Just take the monster and cut it down to something reasonable. ;-) I've just made a start in the German text and deleted the The Council of Ministers ;-) 217.237.151.42 10:15, 27 Aug 2005 (CEST)

focus on multiple languages

Personally I feel that the stress is currently too much on being able to work in different language and too little on ensuring debate as well as resolutions of the debate.

While I strongly favour the right of all European citizens to communicate with European institutions in their own language, and thus think that all final EU law should be available in all national languages, using multiple languages during the debating stage risks producing debates only between speakers of the same language (with the same cultural preferences and prejudices) - thus hardly any debate at all.

i am French and live in Poland - IMHO there is no way that anything like a representative mix of people in France and Poland will seriously participate if they have to use English. i know many people who can read and/or talk in English if they really need to, but the English language barrier nevertheless cuts them out in practice from a lot of information sources. Moreover, often those people who are most active in defending human rights or the environment are those who put learning English as low on their priority list. Of course, there will be some people from the non-English speaking countries who will participate (such as me :), but we have to respect the fact that different language versions will diversify unless we have many interlingual people. And if we don't have enough interlingual people will to participate, then we don't have Europe anyway... Boud 12:32, 17 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Personally I would favour working in International English only until the draft version sort-of stabilizes, or in the very least not decree by committee that all translations should be provided. Let it be a voluntary effort like in wikipedia and others...

(oh and in case you wonder - English is not my first language either)

Please don't forget that there are Member States in which only a minority of the population can speak English. Suggestions for a solution of this problem can be found in Wikitution talk:Community Portal (Languages and Milestones).

I can see the point of wanting to involve non-English speakers, but I also foresee great difficulties with working on separate language versions at the same time.

That is just asking for unsolvable contradictions between language versions. I would therefore propose working on only ONE version (taking the current English one seems most practical) while allowing everyone who does not speak English (well enough) to edit this version in his/her preferred language. So over time you could get a "rainbow" text consisting of a mixture of languages. Whoever feels up to it could translate non-English bits in the rainbow text into English, or (parts of) the entire rainbow text into the other languages. This should happen as often as possible while the work is still going on, in order to allow as many people to read the current version of the text in a language they understand.

The advantage would be that there is at least one version (the rainbow/English text) which is leading, so you would not get contradictions between the language versions (unless the translations are bad, but that can be sorted out).

Eulogist - www.european-democracy.org 16:02, 24 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Nonconstraining/Nonlibertarian constitutions

I'm interested in developing an idealized constitution for a fictional vaguely U.S. like nation, but I'm more interested in methods of democrasy than in what the government should and shouldn't do. Indeed, I feel that coonstitutions should be about "forms of government" and not about "content or powers". Hence I'm only interested in a cite that hosts more than one wiki constitution!!

Also, I don't think we can reasonably hope to write a constitution which will be used by the E.U. or U.S., but we can hash out some ideas and try to understand something. In particular, our gooal should be to submit a articles to political science journals.

-- Nyarlathotep 23:25, 26 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Okay, after thinking about my idea a good bit more. I feel I can implement this in a NPOV manor on WikiBooks. Here is the proposal:

A book of example constitutions (chapters) which focus on showing off various ideas about the form of government, like IRV, approval voting, etc. Little or no consern would be given to wheather any particular activity is a legitimate function of government or not. We just want a collection of examples that put all the newest ideas about elllections and democracy in one place. In particular, most people who discuss Arrows theorem give only a few words to those who think it can be gotten around. Obviously it would be the job of such a WikiBook to collect the ideas about how to get arround Arrow Theorem. NPOV means that both pro and con arguments would be given for each solution. Other ideas include testing representatives for psyopathy. when jurries and refferendums should and should not be used. etc. I feel I can write at least one of these consititutions, the one which demonstrates popular control of the budget.

Oh, WikiBook's doesn't like original work per se, but this isn't really original work in that sence. We are not doing research on what democratic methods are viable, just providing an interesting way to read the index of other people research into such things. And my hope is that by writing constitutions, we can draw out a few people who know something.  :) 134.214.102.33 00:00, 30 Aug 2005 (CEST)