Accidental Constitution Accidentally Erased?
A couple of readers have recently reminded me of a long-ago promise, still unfulfilled, to read Peter Norman’s book on the European Constitutional Convention, The Accidental Constitution, and then review/comment upon it on these pages. Those are timely reminders, too, in view of last week’s Brussels summit that finally produced a modified draft Constitution that all the assembled governmental representations could agree on. (Within the next two years we’ll see about the very different question of whether the national legislatures and/or voters of each of the twenty-five member-states can agree on it too, a very different question.) The Constitution issue is alive and interesting again, and this book should indeed cast valuable light on the issues involved.
I blame Proxis, the Belgium-based Amazon-clone from whom I ordered this book back in the first week of December (that’s 2003). It wasn’t available right away, which I can understand, so they put the order on hold – and apparently they were able to keep that order on hold for over five months, as the book apparently continued to be unavailable. Put another way, via their website they advertised a book which it turned out they couldn’t actually deliver, within five months at least and who knows for how much longer? (I finally canceled this order a while ago.)
I’ll still be glad to continue to use Proxis, but this is still rather annoying; I was counting on the actual arrival of the book to function as the most excellent kind of reminder that now I needed to read it, for myself and for the benefit of all my €S fans. Now I’ll have to try again. I think I’ll order it this time via that EuroComment site which is the very link I give above to those of you needing more information about this book.
