‘‘Poland’s opposition remains the biggest hurdle to a revamped constitution. Warsaw has repeatedly threatened to veto talks on a new charter [and] has proved . . . to be one of the most awkward and unpredictable members of the group.’’

– International Herald Tribune, June 14

‘‘The [Polish] compromise . . . has been shelved by the constitutional committee . . . due to the obstinacy of the Poles themselves. The Poles have played their hand with extreme clumsiness, and supplied another proof of their political inability.’’

– The New York Times, June 15

These newspaper accounts tell the story of a European integration project mired in constitutional crisis. The events they describe could have been separated by only twenty-four hours; in fact, the articles were published 135 years apart. The first article tells of Polish efforts to block German plans for constitutional reform at a June 2007 conference in Brussels, capital of the European Union (EU). The second describes a similar episode that occurred in June 1872 in Vienna, capital of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In both cases, the aim was to devise a durable formula by which the affairs of multiple nations could be jointly governed; in both, progress was blocked by rivalry between old and new members of the union; and in both, the resulting deadlock was broken by a temporary solution, leaving the task of true reform for another day. In Austria-Hungary’s case, that day never came. Decades of crisis and compromise failed to produce the constitutional changes necessary to make stakeholders of all of the empire’s eleven nationality groups. A century later, the same question that Austria stumbled over now confronts the EU: How to create a multinational union that is unified enough to protect the common interests of its members but flexible enough to allow them to determine their own political destinies.

Read the full article here.