Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-13-Speech-4-127"
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"en.20000413.3.4-127"2
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"The citizens of Europe, especially workers, farmers, small and medium-sized enterprises, women, the young, the nouveaux pauvres, all those who suffer under the policies of the EU, are already voicing their anger and disagreement, some more forcefully than others, with the choices being made by the European Union.
What is the point of limiting the number of MEPs, despite the increase in the number of Member States of the European Union, if not to silence those voices which criticise capitalist forces and their plans and promote political processes which brook no alternatives and which are confined to vapid changes of power which pose no threat to capitalism?
Why is the role of national parliaments being eroded by substantially limiting democratic scrutiny?
Why is the weighting of votes in the Council being changed for the benefit of the large countries, at the expense of smaller countries?
There is only one conclusion to be drawn from the EP resolution, which the MEPs of the Communist Party of Greece will be voting against, and from the Commission’s recent proposals. The people of Europe can once again expect no good to come out of this Intergovernmental Conference. They alone can defend their rights by conducting their own fights, fights which the EU will face in ever more acute form, ever more dynamic form, despite all its efforts to mislead, pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and sugar the pill. Fights which will lead to coordinated action by the peoples of the EU, to a strong, pan-European, grass-roots front opposed to the EU and its policies and fighting for a different sort of Europe free from rulers, exploitation and war.
Unfortunately, instead of heeding the anxiety and supporting the claims of all these classes of society, the resolution on the Intergovernmental Conference kow-tows to capitalist forces and adopts the decisions made by the monopolies to militarise Europe and intervene in third countries, including militarily, in order to limit further still the national independence and the grass-roots sovereignty of individual countries.
With the Single European Act and the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, the ΕU is now beginning, under the pressure of enlargement and the new order, to address issues which it was unable to solve at previous intergovernmental conferences.
Despite proclamations to the contrary, what we have before us is an integrated plan of attack by capitalist forces on the democratic, social, collective and personal rights and freedoms which workers have fought hard to acquire within the context of bourgeois democracy.
The European Union is being used by imperialists and multinationals as a battering ram to break the people’s resistance and make them give up their fight for a better tomorrow.
The efforts being made, supposedly in the name of democracy and the “effectiveness of the institutions”, seek mainly to serve the interests of monopolies and they will inevitably be opposed by the workers and people of Europe.
What is the implication behind generalising the majority voting rule by introducing majority voting, in terms of both the number of States and the number of EU citizens, if not complete indifference to, and degradation of, the interests of the “smaller” countries, of the less developed regions, of the weaker classes of society and of the working and grass-roots classes of the EU in general?
How else are we to interpret the abolition of a country’s right of veto when its vital national interests are at stake?
What is the point of rotating Commissioners’ nationalities and not rotating the presidency of the Union if not to exile a supposedly small country from the centre of power for long periods of time so that it is basically unable to defend its interests and the interests of its people, insofar as they can be defended within the framework of the European Union?"@en1
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