Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-06-Speech-3-163"
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"en.20020206.8.3-163"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, the fact that the European institutions are democratic does not just strengthen our Europe of principles; with the prospect of enlargement, it is the
for its very existence. If the gap between the institutions and our citizens gets any wider, the time will come, sooner rather than later, when they turn their backs on us.
The role of the national parliaments is predicated on the philosophy that the European Union is a union of states and a union of nations. As a union of nations, it expresses itself through the European Parliament and, as a union of states, it expresses itself through the national executives, which in turn rely on the trust placed in them by their national parliaments. A strong European Parliament and strong national parliaments. The involvement of the national parliaments in the decisions taken by the Council of Ministers must be visible, subject to control and sanctioned by the national parliaments. It is the national parliaments which will keep their citizens in touch with developments in the European Union and make them feel that they are European citizens.
What all this means is that we urgently need national constitutional reforms, as Giorgio Napolitano explains in his exceptional report, so that the Member States' European policy can be constantly baptised in the waters of the national parliaments. This in turn means that we need new mechanisms for information to flow from the Union to the national parliaments and to ensure that, institutionally, they are up to scratch.
The high profile of the national parliaments at the Convention convened to prepare the next round of Treaty reforms is, I think, of historic importance. And even if the proposals made by the Convention will not be legally binding on the next Intergovernmental Conference, its democratic credentials will be such that they will be hard to ignore. However, what we do not need is for the national parliaments to be represented in a new European institution which gets bogged down in what is, whichever way you look at it, a lot of European red tape. Upgrading the role of the national parliaments in giving credence to European decisions will strengthen the procedure in question; at the same time, however, it honours the role of the nation states as the legal and cultural expression of their people in this exciting unifying structure. Once again, my warmest thanks to Giorgio Napolitano for his excellent report."@en1
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