Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-12-14-Speech-2-034"
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"en.19991214.3.2-034"2
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"Mr President, the Helsinki Summit was an event of historic significance. The EU is to get its own military rapid reaction corps. The world’s largest trading power is to begin establishing its own military force, and the world is on the way to acquiring a new superstate in addition to the USA. To be sure, it has been agreed that the EU army is not really an EU army at all because it is not on a permanent basis, but then nor are NATO armed forces or a Eurocorps on a permanent basis either. The EU army is the same, in having a command structure of troops and hardware to be deployed on a variety of tasks. Let us call a spade a spade and an EU army an EU army. With its own currency, police force and military, the EU is to dispose of the resources normally pertaining to a Nation State. The EU already has more legislative power than other federations, and the essence of the next treaty will be more majority decision making. We are on the way from a confederation to a federal State, but this is still only the last but one treaty before the drafting of a constitution for just such a federal State, for no-one is going to give up the right of veto in regard to the amendment of the Treaties, the levying of new taxes and the sending of soldiers off to war.
The next treaty too will contain familiar echoes of the nation States of old. France and Britain will not be submitting their nuclear weapons to EU control. We are to get a quasi-federal confederation dominated by the three biggest countries, Europe’s former great powers. Enlargement will not take the form of negotiations concerned with creating a common, democratic Europe. The first requirement of enlargement is that the Eastern and Central European countries discard everything they themselves have decided and replace it with the European Union’s common legislation, the sacred and universal
. Their newly won right to deliberate on new laws in elected parliaments is to be transferred to negotiators behind more closed doors in Brussels. Their electors and elected representatives are to surrender power to officials and ministers. Democracy, for them, is to become the exception rather than the rule, as has also happened in our own case.
Matters need not reach this pass. We must hope that there are people who dare to say no to the penultimate treaty before the drafting of an actual constitution and who dare to prepare the ground for replacing regimentation and centralism with a Europe of democracies and diversites. Following this criticism, I should just like to commend the Finnish Presidency for having promoted the cause of openness by means of the Presidency’s new home pages. These have been very useful, and I hope that the Portuguese Presidency will take its cue from this initiative."@en1
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