Constitutional Political Economy, 7, 281-291 (1996) © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. Manufacturedin The Netherlands. Vibert's Vision: Constitutional Theory in Search of a Constitution RANDALL G. HOLCOMBE Department of Economics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FI. 32306, USA Abstract. Frank Vibert's book, Europe: A Constitution for the Millennium, draws on constitutionaleconomics to describe how aEuropean constitutionshouldbe developed to governaEuropean politicalunion. Vibert's theoretical constitutional framework is solid, but his analysis has two shortcomings. First, he discusses constitutional theory but never presents any specific constitutional provisions that would be based on that theory. This makes the feasibility of drawing up an acceptable constitution appear more straightforwardthan it actually is. Second, he assumes that Europe will eventually be politically unified in much the same manner as the United States, and does not consider alternatives. Rather than having a single European government, as Vibert suggests, a better alternative would be to have European nations united through a variety of treaties, agreements, and multinational organizations. JEL classification: H1 Frank Vibert's optimistically titled book, Europe: A Constitution for the Millennium, is based on the premise that the desire for an economic union in Europe will lead toward political integration. Vibert draws on the budding subdiscipline of constitutional economics to describe how the European constitution should be developed. As such, the book is fundamentally normative in character. It is solidly grounded in positive constitutional theory, but the positive theory is used to develop an argument about how things should be done as Europe moves toward unification. Vibert does a good job of considering the details, and his arguments rest firmly on the foundation of constitutional theory. At the same time, he tells the story as if Europe is inevitabiy headed toward a complete political union, and takes as his task the analysis of optimal constitutional rules for such a union. "Over the coming years Europe will establish a political union," Vibert (p. xxi) unequivocally states. Not everyone would agree that a complete political union is inevitable, however, and the book would have benefited from stepping back to evaluate just how much of a union would be desirable. 1 There is good reason to think that Vibert assumes a greater degree of political unification than would be optimal. Vibert's constitutional ideal is strikingly similar to the early U.S. Constitution, not so much in its administrative details but in its commitment to the right of individual freedom from coercion, and the principle of a union government subordinate to its individual states. Thus, it is easy to imagine a United States of Europe, now designed in a manner similar to the United States of America in 1789, evolving into a powerful central government like the United States of America at the end of the 20th century. If that Europe 200 years hence were to come to pass, individual states would have only minimal powers of their own. The problems of governing a large nation with diverse interests would be more severe in Europe than in the United States, however. Europe will remain more heterogeneous than