Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-17-Speech-1-042"
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"en.20011217.3.1-042"2
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"Madam President, allow me to start by using a military analogy in these times of war.
Mr Verhofstadt, over the past six months, you, together with your colleagues in the federal government and the federal state governments, have been Europe’s Lieutenant-General. Unfortunately, however, you have been the Lieutenant-General of an ill-disciplined army, an army in which too often the Member States refuse to bow to your supreme authority, in which all too many Member States act at their own discretion and wish to go their own way and in which the Member States only serve their own interests and too often put narrow state nationalism above the general European interest.
You may have been aware of this over the past six months, Mr Verhofstadt, but we experience this on a daily basis in our files. Credit to you for having succeeded in creating a sense of order in that ill-disciplined army at Laeken. However, the Council is not only an ill-disciplined army, they are also a bunch of opportunists: typically, they quickly wanted to resolve the location issue on Saturday evening. Credit to you once again, Mr Verhofstadt, for having nipped this in the bud.
For we want, in fact, to move away from the back-room mentality, we want to move away from closed meetings between officials, between diplomats and between fifteen Heads of Government. We are in favour of an open method, we want to give the Convention’s hopeful method a chance, we want to throw open the doors to let a fresh breeze in.
You posed the right questions at the Convention. You rightly stated that the debate should be about the distribution of powers at different policy levels. You also rightly questioned whether it would not be better to leave the daily running of the Union’s policy to the regions where the constitution regulates this automatically.
However, Mr Verhofstadt, could I also level some form of criticism? You did not ask, for example, how constitutional regions, including Flanders, Wallonia, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Scotland and Wales could emphatically be involved in European decision-making. In failing to do so, you have ignored the demands of your party colleague, Mr Patrick Dewael, the Prime Minister of Flanders, who, together with some fifty colleagues, had even published a weighty document on this matter in May and in October.
I should like to make three observations with regard to the composition of the Convention. Firstly, I do not believe that a triumvirate without the presence of one single woman genuinely reflects present-day society. Secondly, there is an imbalance in the composition of the Convention between the MEPs, on the one hand, and national parliaments, on the other. You, the Council, are making a mistake here. In my view, the European Parliament is the institution
where the European idea, where the European general interest, applies, and you are missing an opportunity here. And my final comment with regard to the composition of the Convention is that the representatives of the constitutional regions are unable to participate directly in the Convention. They need to take the indirect route of the Committee of the Regions as observers, and that is a sad state of affairs in my view.
Mr Verhofstadt, whatever happens, you can rely on me and my party, with the nine representatives of the European Free Alliance, to make a constructive contribution to this Convention, for Europe must not lead to uniformity. Europe must remain a sparkling diamond with many facets, facets displaying its diversity and its own identity, for only then can the European diamond sparkle in the European firmament."@en1
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