Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-04-Speech-2-071"
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"en.20000704.3.2-071"2
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"Madam President, Mr President, as our English chums say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Well, this is the recipe for this improbable European Union of ours, which every day intrudes further into the daily life of the peoples of Europe. For six months, then, we shall have French leadership. In any other area, this would be a guarantee of the best quality, as we have just seen. Unfortunately, there will be two parties that appear to have problems in agreeing on the menu to be served in Nice. Thank heavens, the local gastronomic style, which I know very well, will get us out of the predicament. A simple way of cooking provides the best results with the fewest ingredients.
On a more serious note, ladies and gentlemen, the Intergovernmental Conference is akin to the squaring of the circle for one quite simple reason, but one that everyone conspires to conceal. It is not a matter of settling a few minor details but of selecting a new decision-making process within a set of institutions that governs 80% of the lives of Europeans and which, whether we like it or not, as already quasi-federal in nature. The issue at stake for each of our countries, especially the least populated ones, is whether they retain or lose their involvement at Community level, whether they give up or retain their right to say ‘no’, and whether or not they agree to be subject to an outside jurisdiction. The Brussels Commission, from the very outset, and the Council of Ministers, since the Treaty of Amsterdam withdrew this initiative are federal institutions, as Parliament is, and as indeed are the European Central Bank and the Court of Justice.
So if the proposals outlined by the French Presidency, particularly making qualified majority voting the general rule, are confirmed in Nice, then we should once and for all have enabled this federal Europe to operate in isolation, protected from all the national democracies that simply gather for the quarterly photograph of the European Council.
Having appropriated monetary and judicial authority, they now wish to take all executive and legislative power away from the nation states. These problems may explain the fact that, abandoning the sterility of the compulsory ritual stipulated by the IGC, some leaders, following the example set by the German Minister for Foreign Affairs, have given in to the urge to go in for a freestyle approach, with the advantages and disadvantages this entails, the latter far outweighing the former, in my opinion. For the European Union is like a party where everyone brings along the food they wish to eat: Britain sees it as a market, France as a policy, Italy as a credo, Germany as a hope and a future. Each of our countries projects its own recipe for greatness onto Europe, even though this view is not shared by its neighbour. It is already hard enough to set up a single currency on this basis, so how on earth is a constitution going to be achieved?
Sovereign states forge agreements by means of treaties, not within a single constitution. The only known exception to this rule was the ephemeral Confederation of Independent States, which we inevitably think of when the concept of a federation of nation states comes up. A constitution is not a list, or a catalogue or an index. A constitution is a basis for a new legal order. It is the supreme law in this order, and takes precedence over all others.
Adopting a European constitution would
render all the national constitutions null and void, reduced to the level of a mere Member State by-law.
The truth, Madam President, Mr President-in-Office of the European Union, is that this Europe is and shall continue to be forced to forge ahead regardless as long as it persists in thinking of itself as essentially superior to the nations which form it and, hence, destined to replace them sooner or later. What is in question is not so much the presumption of such a plan, as its obsolescence. Every day your Europe is being eclipsed more and more in the face of the globalisation achieved by finance, whose centre of gravity is in the United States, and now it is through Europe, through the Commission, through the European Parliament that the most dubious regulations of this globalisation are being foisted on our fellow citizens. This is where chocolate is abolished but GMOs are legalised. This is where …"@en1
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"(The President cut the speaker off since speaking time had expired)"1
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