The European Constitution is going to be signed today. It then still has to be ratified by the member countries of the european union, but it is already a great step towards a more unified Europe.

The big ceremony is in Rome. Lot of people do speeches, they cite Victor Hugo and Erasmus of Rotterdam, they mention the great achievements of european politics in the last 50 years, they talk about future, war on terrorism, and a lot of other stuff. What they do not talk about is: the constitution is 400 pages thick, it weighs nearly 2kg. Who will read this? And even worse, you just cannot read it. I tried. I gave up on page 4. (And I managed to get to page 15 in Joyce's Finnegans Wake...) It is completely ununderstandable, I tried in german, english, french, portuguese. Not a word. It is all in Law-Speek.

A constitiuon is something so important, that it should be short and readable by everyone. And it should not regulate everything, it is a foundation for laws, not a substitution. But I am just a stupid phyisicist, so I may be wrong. I will just keep on being amused by the TV commentaries like "Oh, now he switched to a language we do not have a translator for..." (like Dutch and Portuguese...)