Questions and answers

We meet the first Copenhagen criterion comfortably. Stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and the protection of minorities is a fair description of Titles III, VII and VIII, and we would welcome the examination.

We fail the second by design. The economic criterion requires a functioning market economy and the capacity to withstand competitive pressure within the internal market. Article 6 abolishes income from the bare holding of productive assets and Article 88(3) prohibits enterprises operating for profit. There is no version of us that satisfies that criterion while remaining us.

People sometimes point to Article 345 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which says the Treaties do not prejudice the rules in member states governing the system of property ownership. That is true and it is narrower than it sounds. It preserves the formal question of who owns a thing; it does not disapply free movement of capital, the state aid rules or competition law, all of which would reach our planning apparatus directly.

The deeper obstacle is constitutional, and the economics come second. Since Van Gend en Loos in 1963 and Costa against ENEL in 1964, Union law has direct effect and primacy over national law. Article 294 of this Constitution refuses the direct effect entirely: a common standard reaches nobody here until the Assembly enacts it. Two legal orders cannot both have the last word. Article 293(3) then settles the matter by forbidding membership of any union whose founding instrument requires a market in the means of production.

It is a decision, and the chamber should own it as one. Forty per cent of our external exchange runs through a maritime corridor to a state of four million people because the land border south has been shut since 1939 and the largest market on the continent is constitutionally closed to us.

My party's position is that Article 293(3) should be revisited under Title XII, and that association short of membership deserves examination on its merits, and no clause beyond the reach of any majority should rule it out in advance.

No, and not as a matter of preference. Article 295(5) states that in no case may the Republic accept a common currency, a common monetary authority, or an obligation to maintain a rate, a reserve or a convertibility. Article 7(5) has already abolished currency internally in the three functions that make it capital.

Exchange with the Bloc is settled in goods, labour, technique and knowledge through a single external account, in physical units. Where a counterparty insists on a unit of settlement we use one to compute a balance, and it circulates nowhere and is held by no resident.

It is the opposite arrangement on the point that matters. The Union's method is a common legal order with primacy, which is a serious and coherent design. Ours is a common standard that binds nobody until each parliament enacts it.

The cost is real: we can be outvoted in the Bloc and still decline, and the instrument may attach consequences. We accepted that cost because the alternative was a body that could amend this Constitution without going through Title XII, and Article 291 forbids treaties that do that in any case.

Because trading with a state is not the same as joining its legal order. The Union is the largest buyer within reach of a port we can actually use, and Article 298 requires us to meet need from our own production first, from the Bloc second, and only then from elsewhere. What we sell is the surplus of the one thing this territory has in quantity.

Foreign firms operate here under Article 21 and nothing else. A revocable public licence, limited in time. Duties on sourcing, disclosure, labour, ecology and reparation stricter than those borne by our own cooperatives. Transfer of technique to the knowledge commons as a condition of the licence. No right under Title III, which is reserved to natural persons. And under Article 21(6) no submission of this Republic to any foreign or arbitral jurisdiction, which is the clause that ends most negotiations before they start.

There are eleven such licences at present. They cover shipping, cargo certification, insurance and brokerage, because those functions have to be performed inside foreign jurisdictions and our own institutions cannot do that. Every one of them is published, with its conditions and its expiry.

Because it is the clearest recent case of the thing Article 117(5) is written against, and because the argument about it is still live.

The facts are not in dispute. Greece entered successive adjustment programmes from 2010. Output fell by roughly a quarter from peak to trough and unemployment peaked near twenty-eight per cent in 2013. A large private-sector debt restructuring took place in 2012. Capital controls were imposed in June 2015 and not fully lifted until 2019. In July 2015 a referendum rejected the creditors' proposals and an agreement on comparable terms followed within days.

The interpretations are in dispute, and honestly so. The creditor institutions argued that the fiscal position was unsustainable, that reform conditionality was the only instrument available, and that relief without reform would simply recur. Critics argued that the austerity was self-defeating because it shrank the base it was meant to repair, and that a debt widely understood to be unpayable was maintained anyway for institutional reasons. The International Monetary Fund's own ex-post evaluation in 2013 accepted that the fiscal multipliers had been underestimated and that debt restructuring had come too late.

The finance minister of 2015 argued against the programmes and resigned the day after the referendum. The prime minister of 2011 proposed putting the second package to a referendum and withdrew the proposal within days under pressure from other governments, then left office. Both episodes are matters of public record and both are read differently depending on where you start.

The Republic draws one lesson and states it narrowly. A government that has borrowed abroad under conditionality no longer decides its own budget, whatever its constitution says, and whatever its people vote. So Article 117(5) prohibits borrowing abroad, external debt, pledging the common heritage, and accepting external financial conditionality, and Article 291(1) prohibits treaties that create any of them. We removed the mechanism outright. Trusting ourselves to resist it was the weaker course.

It would, if nothing replaced it. Something does. The Audit Office audits every organ, territory, planning body and cooperative in physical and ecological units, publishes in full, and can be set in motion by ten thousand residents. The Ecological Budget Authority verifies the accounts independently. My own office publishes every declaration of interest and refers what it finds to the courts.

The difference is who the scrutiny answers to. A creditor's conditions answer to the creditor. These answer to residents, and any of them can bring the finding to court under Article 43.

We are not a member and could not become one. Article 8(2) prohibits any foreign military installation on the territory, and Article 277(3) requires a law passed by two thirds of the Assembly and the approval of a referendum before our forces act beyond the frontier for any purpose other than rescue or disaster relief. A commitment that obliges us to act automatically cannot be squared with a requirement that we ask the people first.

That is a structural answer and not a verdict. The alliance's members describe it as a defensive arrangement; its critics describe its enlargement as a driver of the insecurity it was meant to answer. Both positions are held by serious people and neither is ours to settle. What we can say is that Article 268 renounces war as an instrument of policy and confines armed force to repelling an attack on this territory, and that we have no standing army to lend anyone.

The same test, applied the same way. Article 288 asks what a state does: whether it tortures, holds people in forced labour, suppresses assembly and expression, imprisons people for their opinions, persecutes on a prohibited ground, or conducts a war of aggression or an occupation. That last limb is in the text and it means what it says.

Article 286(4) forbids us to recognise any territorial acquisition obtained by force. That provision applies to every acquisition and to every acquirer, and it is not a new position: this Republic has been on the receiving end of two blockades and an embargo, and its border with Bor Brashavenko has been shut since a neighbouring monarchy chose an alliance in 1939.

We support neither bloc. Non-alignment here is not a posture of equivalence between them. It follows from Article 286(1), which binds us to non-intervention, and from the fact that we have no instrument of pressure that does not fall on a population. No findings under Article 288 have yet been made against any state. They are due by July 2028 under Article 336(2), they will be made by law after a public and reasoned procedure, and they will be reviewable in court by anyone who thinks we got them wrong.

Not of the kind that reach a population. Article 286(4) prohibits participating in a blockade that deprives people of food, water, medicine or energy, and prohibits any measure whose effect falls upon a population.

Measures aimed at individuals and at the specific instruments of harm are a different thing, and Article 270(3) already forbids us to export a weapon, a component of a weapon, or a technique of surveillance or coercion to anyone at all. We do not need a sanctions regime to decline to arm someone. We decline to arm everyone.

The pattern is structural, and affection has nothing to do with it. I would resist the word poor. We have neutral relations with all three and dense ones with none.

What a great power generally wants from a small state is alignment, basing, procurement, and a forum in which disputes with its firms are decided outside that state's courts. We cannot supply any of them. Article 8(2) prohibits foreign military installations. Article 277(3) requires a referendum before our forces act beyond the frontier, which makes an automatic commitment impossible. Article 270(3) prohibits us from exporting a weapon or a component of one to anybody. Article 21(6) and Article 291(1) prohibit investor arbitration. Article 117(5) prohibits external debt and financial conditionality, which removes the usual instrument of influence in both directions.

The specific frictions differ. With the United States it is extraterritorial sanctions, which Article 286(4) obliges us to refuse where they reach a population, and the arbitration clauses that appear in its trade agreements. With China it is the terms on which infrastructure and technology are offered, since Article 21(3) makes transfer to the knowledge commons a condition of any licence and Article 163 forbids the delegation of public functions to anyone. With Russia it is Article 286(4), which obliges us to recognise no territorial acquisition obtained by force, and the limb of Article 288(1) that names a war of aggression. Each of those governments would describe the position differently, and they are entitled to.

The Union asks for none of those things before it will trade. It has no basing requirement, no alliance condition, courts that publish their reasoning, and standards in labour, chemicals and ecology that sit closer to ours than anyone else's.

It would be, if the relationship were uncritical, and it is not. We refuse the Union's core legal doctrine: Article 294 denies direct effect to every act of any union we belong to. We refuse its economic criterion outright. And we object, in terms, to the externalisation of its frontier. Article 296(5) prohibits any agreement obliging us to prevent departure from another state, to detain people on another state's behalf, or to run asylum procedures on someone else's territory, and Article 296(6) prohibits funding, equipping or training any foreign body whose function is preventing movement. Several Union member states do all of these things.

So the position is that one neighbour's demands happen to be compatible with our Constitution and the others' are not. If the Union adopted a common defence obligation with automatic effect, or required investor arbitration of us, the relationship would cool within a session and no vote would be needed, because Article 291 would simply void the instrument.

The movement imagines ecological abundance, appropriate technology, repair, and settlements that look like somewhere you would want to live. We agree with almost all of it, and Articles 33, 108 and 110 are close to its programme written as enforceable duties: goods repairable by their user, parts guaranteed for ten years, the deliberate shortening of a service life prohibited.

Where we part company is aesthetics. A picture of a green city is not an institution. The thing that stops a river dying is not a mural, it is Article 27, which lets any person on earth sue on the river's behalf without a fee. You may notice that this register is plain to the point of severity. That is deliberate as we spent twenty years under a planning directorate that published beautiful things and no data.

The argument, made most fully by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective in 2021, is that the European far right has increasingly fused nationalism with the defence of fossil capital, so that climate denial and the politics of the border reinforce one another. Its critics answer that this reads more coherence into those movements than they possess, and that some of them have since adopted ecological language of their own.

We are not obliged to settle it, and we would be unwise to try, because Article 12(4) forbids any administrative authority in this Republic from classifying a political association by its ideology, and Article 263 forbids my colleague's office from doing it either. We learned that lesson expensively in September 2024.

What we do instead is remove the thing being defended. Article 32(2) prohibits fossil extraction on this territory outright and phases out combustion on a schedule that may be shortened and never lengthened. Article 265(1)(p) makes it void for anyone to raise an ecological ceiling except on published evidence of regenerative capacity. You cannot build a politics on defending an industry that no majority is able to restore.

Neither slogan, and one number. Article 22 holds the total throughput of energy and materials constant at the safe level, and Article 22(3) forbids spending an efficiency gain on expanding it. Gains go to sufficiency of provision, restoration, durability and shorter hours.

That closes the rebound effect by law, which is the point on which green growth arguments have historically failed, and it avoids the degrowth formulation that a smaller economy is itself the objective. Output, provision and quality of life may rise as much as anyone can make them rise, inside a constant physical flow. Whether that is achievable is the largest open question we have, and the first budgets are not due until 2028.

Article 32(6) permits fission as a transitional source and nothing more. Authorisation of any new installation lapses on the day the Ecological Budget Authority certifies that the whole of our supply is renewable, and operating plants retire on a schedule from that date.

The condition attached is the one that usually gets skipped: the labour, materials and energy for custody of the waste and for decommissioning must be reserved inside the plan before operation begins. No reactor begins operation here on the assumption that a later generation will find the resources. Article 258(3) makes the Commissioner for Future Generations examine that reservation at least every five years.

The argument against us is straightforward and I will state it: no institution has yet kept a promise across the timescale that waste requires, and a constitution is not evidence that we will be the first.

This territory has almost no coal worth the digging and no oil at all. What it has, discovered in 1956 while the country was under embargo and looking for anything that would keep the lights on, is uranium: shallow and of high grade. The Republic did not choose that geology and has spent seventy years deciding what to do with it.

The choice made in 1958 was fission, and it is the reason a blockaded state with no fuel could refuse the terms of an embargo outright. By 1970 more than half our electricity came from it. The decision was one of sovereignty, taken to keep a blockaded state supplied. It happened, decades later, to leave us with an electricity system that emits almost nothing.

Article 32(6) now settles the status. Fission is transitional and athorisation of any new installation lapses on the day the Ecological Budget Authority certifies that the whole of our supply is renewable, and operating plants retire on a schedule from that date. Mining and milling sit inside the material ceilings of Article 23(1)(b) like everything else, and the tailings are a contaminated site on the register under Article 34(4).

Because a reactor requires more attention on the way down than on the way up. We are operating an ageing fleet at high availability while building out wind and storage, and every year of that requires inspection, refuelling, component replacement and the regulatory work that goes with it. Then decommissioning takes longer than construction did.

Then there is the waste. Article 32(6) requires the labour, materials and energy for custody and for decommissioning to be reserved inside the plan before a plant operates, and Article 258(3) has the Commissioner for Future Generations examine that reservation at least every five years. Custody runs for the whole period of the material's activity. There is no year in the foreseeable future in which this Republic does not need people who understand these installations, and the training school at Ferrista is oversubscribed in both directions: we cannot train enough, and we cannot promise them the industry will exist in fifty years. Both things are true and we say both to the applicants.

Eleven entities, all constituted under foreign law, all holding a revocable licence under Article 21. They handle shipping, cargo certification, insurance and brokerage for the export of uranium concentrate, fuel assemblies, specialised components and the rare earths from the Ravelluri sands.

What they may not do is longer than what they may. They own nothing here: the constitutional guarantees attaching to social ownership under Article 6 do not extend to them. They hold no right under Title III, which belongs to natural persons. They cannot take a public function under Article 163(3), cannot hold a licence in the systems named in Article 301(1), and cannot compel arbitration. In any proceeding under Title II the burden of proving that their activity conforms to the ecological budgets falls on them, under Article 21(4). They may challenge a protective measure on procedural regularity alone.

And every licence has the transfer of technique to the knowledge commons under Article 21(3). We are, quite deliberately, learning to do without them.

Less than they are owed, which is the same answer my party has given for forty years about the replanting.

Article 34(5) prohibits the concentration of polluting activity in territories inhabited by the poor, and the distribution of ecological burdens is reviewable in court. Article 32(5) requires the participation of the affected commune in the siting of an installation, and compensation for the burdens it has on behalf of everyone else. Article 181 makes equalisation owed as of right and dependent on nobody's assent.

The tailings are above Ferrista, the exhausted seams are under Torvena, the electricity is consumed in Lindoma and we are not asking for the industry to close. We are asking for Article 181 to be read as the entitlement it says it is. At present it is a formula somebody computes in the capital.

It is the nearest real relative and we study it closely. Self-management from 1950, enterprise councils, a genuine attempt at neither central command nor private ownership.

Its documented failures are specific. Labour-managed firms tended to favour existing members over new hires, which suppressed employment. They underinvested, because a member leaving could take nothing away and therefore had little reason to fund a twenty-year asset. Regional inequality widened. In the 1980s the federation borrowed heavily abroad and inflation destroyed what remained.

Every one of those has a provision aimed at it. Article 85(1) makes every worker a member after a probation of at most six months, so there is no category of non-member worker to profit from. Article 84 gives usufruct without disposal, so no member holds a saleable share, and Article 100(4) sends surpluses from technical improvement into the following period's ceiling, and none of it into members' pockets. Article 105 funds new formation from the reserve, and incumbents contribute none of it. Article 181 makes equalisation between territories owed as of right, not negotiated. And Article 117(5) prohibits foreign borrowing entirely, which is the specific rope that federation hanged itself with.

Whether that is enough, I cannot tell you. It is a design informed by a failure, which is better than a design informed by a hope.

A basic income works by giving people money to spend where things are sold in a market. We have no market in housing, healthcare, education, energy, transport or food staples, so an income would be a coupon for a shop that does not exist.

The deeper reason is that cash transfers the risk to the person. If rents rise, an income buys less housing and the recipient absorbs it. Article 62 furnishes the housing. Article 41(2) makes the minimum core enforceable in court immediately, against no plea of insufficient resources. When my committee fails, residents sue us.

I will concede the strongest point against us. A person given money decides for themselves and a person given a dwelling gets what the allocator thought suitable. Article 113 answers that with published rules, published waiting lists and a right of challenge, and Article 111 leaves a personal token for the things that ought to be a matter of taste.

Article 7(5) abolishes currency understood as a store of value, an instrument of accumulation, or a claim upon the labour of others. That is a functional definition and it does not care what the instrument is made of. A token that holds value across time and can be transferred to another person is precisely the thing the Article abolishes, and Article 114(5) prohibits foreign currency from circulating as a means of payment here in any case.

There is a second objection that has nothing to do with ideology. Proof-of-work systems consume energy to no productive end, and every joule in this Republic sits inside a ceiling under Article 23. We would have to take it from something.

You cannot, and I think that is a genuine loss, and my colleagues are wrong to describe it as liberation. Article 88(2) prohibits engaging the labour of anyone outside your household and Article 6(4) prohibits enterprises operating for profit.

What you may do is work alone or with your household at any craft without authorisation, or found a cooperative by registration, which cannot be refused on any discretionary ground, and apply to the reserve for an initial allocation. The chamber should be honest that these are not the same thing. In the first arrangement you decide and bear the risk. In the second you persuade an assembly.

I am recorded here because this register publishes the opposition's answers alongside the government's, which is required by nothing except practice, and which I would rather it kept doing.

There is no limit on the right, and there is a real limit on the capacity, and the Constitution declines to disguise the second as the first.

Article 296 makes free movement a standing objective and Article 59 makes asylum a right, held in full from arrival, with penalisation for irregular entry prohibited. Article 37(2) gives every person present the whole of Title III whether they have documents or not. We fund, equip and train no foreign body whose function is preventing movement, and no agreement may make us detain anyone on another state's behalf.

The capacity question is answered inside the plan. The border answers nothing. Article 63 registers the needs of everyone present, and the planners are bound by the register. If arrivals rise, the requirement on housing and clinics rises with them, and the plan is adjusted under Article 99. Where we fall short, people sue us under Article 41(2) and they win. That is uncomfortable and it is the arrangement we chose.

That the free movement of persons should be the ordinary condition between states and a closed frontier the thing requiring justification. Article 296(1) already makes the removal of barriers to human movement a standing objective of our external policy, so it is not a fringe position here.

The argument is partly principled and partly practical. The principled half is Article 37(2): every right in this Constitution attaches to a person because they are present, not because they belong. A state that means that has no coherent reason to make presence itself the crime. The practical half is that we live behind two closed land frontiers and one open one, and the open one has produced a joint hospital, a doubled town at Ossira and no measurable harm in thirty-seven years.

What we are not proposing is a single world government, or the abolition of the Republic. Article 296(3) is the actual mechanism: reciprocal agreements, state by state, concluded where they impose no obligation contrary to Titles II, III or IV, each one approved by referendum under Article 290(3). Twenty such agreements would be a world Schengen in everything but name, and each would have been voted on separately.

That the sub-regions bearing the cost are never the ones making the argument. Lutoliluri gains a port from open frontiers while aspreduson and Halvorum gain a frontier they have to administer with an allocation computed on a formula.

My party does not oppose Article 296. We voted for it. What we say is that Article 62 obliges the Republic to furnish housing, healthcare, schooling and provision to every person present, and that obligation lands in a commune before it lands in a plan. Article 63 registers the need and Article 99 adjusts the allocation, and there is a lag between those two things measured in seasons. Close the lag and the argument mostly goes away.

No, and the text says so in four places. Article 51(5) requires every decision with legal effect on a person to be taken by an identified, accountable human being, and permits automated systems to assist and never to decide. Article 51(7) prohibits outright any system that scores, ranks or profiles people for the allocation of provision, housing, education or liberty. Article 90(3) says the same for the plan. Article 339(4) repeats it for every organ this Constitution creates.

What they did during the Convention was check cross-references across three hundred and forty articles, model the resource consequences of drafts, and surface contradictions that a human reader misses at this length. Every choice they informed was made and recorded by a person, and the record of the drafting is published under Article 339(2). Article 339(3) then states that their use confers no authority and no interpretive weight, and that no machine may be cited as a source of meaning in construing this text.

The systems are ours, built to the Convention's specification, held in common, and running on software whose source is public. Article 301 would not permit anything else.

Partly, yes, and Article 319 concedes it on the face of the text: length is justified only by the protection it furnishes, and where a guarantee can be secured in fewer words the shorter form is to be adopted.

The reason it is long is that both predecessors were short and both failed for that reason. The 1890 text ran to eleven articles and relied on convention, which held for a hundred and thirty-four years and then did not, and the Republic spent four years with a parliament that could neither act nor be dissolved. The 2024 text was generous and vague, and produced a winter of shortages with no lawful way to rank a claim.

So this one writes down what happens when things go wrong. It also writes down its own remedy: an Office of Constitutional Revision that reports contradictions and proposes simplifications, a summary in plain language delivered free to every dwelling, and a body drawn by lot every ten years asking whether the text still serves the people bound by it. The first of those reviews sits in 2036. I expect it to be unkind, and I expect that to be useful.