Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-07-01-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20030701.1.2-016"2
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"Mr President, the climax of the Greek Presidency was a special summit involving the new nations of the West Balkans. They too are making efforts to enter the EU. They will be sincerely welcome, and I am pleased that the EU Charter of Human Rights contains the recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities that is deserved by everyone in the Balkans.
The EU may have 25 Member States on 1 May of next year, and perhaps 30 in 2007 and 35 in 2010. The process may suddenly go very fast, because the countries concerned find it difficult to see any alternatives, given that, in practice, the EU also legislates for its neighbouring countries. We must reform the EU that much more quickly in order to obtain more supple and flexible decision-making structures suited to Europe in its entirety, with very big differences between countries.
An Estonian language teacher can earn ten times as much by working in Brussels. It is not easy to secure a proper language education in Tallinn. It will be possible for MEPs from Prague to earn 20 times as much as their colleagues in the national parliament, so it will be no fun returning over the Charles Bridge in Prague. One hectare of land in the Netherlands costs 30 times as much as Polish agricultural land. It is scarcely Polish farmers who are buying up Dutch land. The majority of Polish slaughterhouses and dairies are to be closed down when the EU rules come into force. Why not be more flexible in introducing EU rules into the candidate countries and the new partnership countries. There is no one in the EU who is lining up to pay subsidies to unemployed slaughterhouse workers in Poland.
The high point of the Greek Presidency was the solemn signature of the agreements to extend the EU to include ten new Member States. Here we were in the cradle of democracy, welcoming a range of countries that could only enter the EU because they had become democracies. It is one of the Copenhagen criteria that countries can only be accepted when they have stable parliamentary democracies. That is why it is all the more absurd that the concluding summit in Haldidiki accepted the Convention’s draft constitution that would remove the greater part of democracy in both the new and the present Member States. In our case, power is not to reside with those who are elected but with people who were once elected and can now no longer be. When prime ministers can no longer be re-elected in their own countries, they can be appointed to lead us in Europe, without being answerable to the electorate. The national parliaments and the electorate are losing far more power than the EU is gaining, and that is not a guarantee of increased voter turn-out in the EU elections.
Hold referendums on the constitution in all the countries. Ask the voters if they want to participate less in elections. Imagine its being possible, in the birthplace of democracy, to accept Mr Giscard d'Estaing’s getting away with quoting Thucydides, when what the draft constitution does is precisely to remove power from the majority of the electorate in the Member States and give most of it to the bureaucrats in Brussels."@en1
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