Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-04-Speech-3-027"
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"en.20030604.2.3-027"2
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"Mr President, the Chairman of the Convention is due to present his conclusions at the European Council in Thessaloniki on 20 and 21 June next, but he will undoubtedly request an extension for his work. I believe this proposal should be given careful consideration. It is vital that the governments should not allow themselves to be caught between a delayed closure date for the Convention and a fixed deadline for the end of the IGC. The Convention is certainly an interesting forum for debate, but, nevertheless, only democratically accountable governments should have the final say at the Intergovernmental Conference and they must not allow their hands to be tied in advance.
In this regard, we do not at all agree with the Commission’s request, made earlier, for the Convention to provide the Council with a single text with no alternative. That amounts to saying that the Council would have no freedom of choice, that democratic power would be transferred from the governments to a Convention without democratic legitimacy. We do not want that kind of Europe. We want precisely the opposite: to re-establish the roots of Europe in its nations.
Of course, the work of the Convention – drawing up a complete European constitution – is vast, but it was the Convention that wanted it that way. The mandate given by the Nice Council did not involve drawing up a constitution and the Laeken Council only made this a possibility in the long term, in other words, not an immediate concern. We agree with these Councils. Europe is not suited to adopting the constitution of a super-State and that is why the Convention is currently encountering so many difficulties.
The result of this is that we will end up with a lengthy, unmanageable minefield of a document which will need to be refocused on what is in fact Europe’s current priority, which has been pushed to one side since the beginning of the Convention: that control of it by national democracies be improved.
To do so, we might need to go back to the original Community method, which is now long forgotten, based on two pillars: fostering cooperation, in particular with the Commission, and respect for national sovereignty, in particular with the Council. The main flaw in European integration today is the lack of emphasis on this second pillar. That is what we now need to strengthen if we want to recreate the link with the people and with national democracies.
In this regard, the Convention is constantly moving backwards. Control of subsidiarity by the national parliaments has lost all meaning. The Congress of Peoples is no more. The stable presidency of the Council is strongly contested by the Commission. We must stop this constant, disastrous evasion of national democracies by returning power to the Council and granting national parliaments the right of veto."@en1
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