Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-24-Speech-2-022"
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"en.20001024.2.2-022"2
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"Madam President, at the Biarritz Council we saw emerging, from behind the real or supposed quarrels between larger and smaller countries, a different but equally real type of rift between those who want to speed up European integration and those who want to preserve a design for a European Union that respects Member States and national democracies.
The first group would seem willing to engage in ultrafederalism within a hard core of States, and the referendum in Denmark seems to have strengthened their convictions on this. My Group would like to warn them against this. By persisting in this approach, they would probably cut Europe in half, and even more surely would cut themselves off from their own nation. For the referendum held on 28 September was not simply an expression of the Danes’ refusal to be run by a European superstate and their desire to preserve their national democracy. It also mirrored the feelings of many citizens in other Member States, even if these feelings are sometimes more abstract given the lack of a means to convey them.
Were their voices heard at Biarritz? One might well doubt it, in view of the fact that the most clear-cut decision taken during the Biarritz Council was to proclaim the Charter of Fundamental Rights at Nice. The ultimate goal of this Charter, should it become binding, would be to strip each national democracy of the right to itself determine the rights and duties of its own citizens. Worse still, the major concern of those promoting the Charter actually seems to be how to make it binding without first having it ratified by the national parliaments.
The decision that it will be proclaimed at Nice has already been taken solely by the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council. The Commission subsequently informed us, in its Communication of 11 October, that the Charter could be rendered binding through the case law of the Court of Justice, still without any say from the national parliaments. It will therefore have been possible to strip the nations of Europe of their most fundamental right without ever openly having asked their citizens for an opinion. It is thus impossible to claim that Biarritz genuinely listened to the demand, as expressed in the referendum in Denmark, that national democracies be respected within the Union."@en1
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