Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-011"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20030924.1.3-011"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to set before this House the guidelines that the Italian Presidency intends to follow in conducting the Intergovernmental Conference.
We have already expressed our views on the inappropriateness of reopening debates that have already been thrashed out in the Convention; revisiting them could only lead to less consensual and less ambitious results. The Intergovernmental Conference must not, therefore, change the overall structure and balance of the draft Constitutional Treaty but will, instead, be called upon to improve and add to those parts of the text that need clarifying, completing or supplementing, all with the greatest transparency and openness.
Our objective is to achieve a quality result that both meets the expectations of European public opinion and can ensure that the enlarged Union operates effectively and democratically.
Giving the European Union a Constitution is a challenge, and not just for certain Member States or for the Italian Presidency, whose task it is to steer the Council through this phase. It is a challenge for everybody. It is a commitment to our citizens: if we do not succeed in this challenge, as Mr Frattini said to his fellow ministers at Riva del Garda, it will be a defeat for the Union as a whole and a serious setback in terms of our goal of making Europe a respected leader on the world stage as a force for peace, democracy, stability and prosperity.
We should not disguise the fact that the final outcome is not at all a foregone conclusion: the process might reach a deadlock or even break down. I should like to make it quite clear, in this regard, that the Italian Presidency is not willing to make any compromises that do not abide by the spirit of the key elements of the draft produced by the Convention.
In this context, the Presidency believes that greater involvement of the European Parliament in the Intergovernmental Conference’s work is essential in order to safeguard the constitutional legacy of the Convention and to avoid falling back into the narrow, nationalistic ways of thinking that produced the obscure agreements at Nice.
At the last Intergovernmental Conference, the European Parliament took part in the group of personal representatives, where it made a constructive and much-appreciated contribution. The Italian Presidency feels that, since preparatory technical working groups will not be formally set up this time, it makes sense for Parliament to be fully involved in the Intergovernmental Conference meetings at Foreign Minister level.
With regard to the meetings of Heads of State or Government, the Italian Presidency undertakes to make every effort to secure agreement on ways of involving the President of Parliament much more and of keeping him much better informed than at previous Intergovernmental Conferences.
The recent Riva del Garda talks did not result in agreed guidelines on this matter. The Heads of State or Government will therefore have to come to a decision on it themselves when the Intergovernmental Conference opens. At that time, the Italian Presidency will work along the lines that I have just sketched out for you.
Today, we are on the eve of a fundamentally important event in the history of European integration. The Italian Government is aware of the role that Parliament has played over the last two decades to achieve a more democratic, more cohesive and fairer Union. It was the Spinelli draft Treaty that reinvigorated that process of European integration which – through the Single Act and the Treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice – has led to the completion of the single market, the adoption of the euro, and the ever greater sharing of sovereignty in the fields of foreign policy, justice and home affairs. At the same time, your Parliament, speaking directly for the peoples of the Union, has taken on ever greater and more effective colegislative and monitoring powers. Your support will therefore be crucial in the coming months, which will see the enlarged Europe enter its constitutional phase, the crowning point of the long process that was begun by the founding fathers with the Treaties of Paris and Rome and which should lead us to ever closer union between our states and our citizens. This tradition of a shared understanding strengthens the Italian Presidency’s determination to stay in constant contact with the European Parliament: in this spirit, the President of the Republic, Mr Ciampi, will be addressing you next week to express once again the firm belief in Europe that is the joint heritage of all the main political, economic, social and cultural forces in Italy.
Thanks, not least, to the essential contribution made by representatives of Parliament, the Convention has written an historic page in the process of European integration. For the first time, the European Union’s institutions, the governments of the Member States and of the accession countries, the national parliaments and civil society have all taken part in a structured, all-embracing, public and transparent debate on the future of Europe.
The Convention has successfully accomplished a gargantuan task within the timeframe set by the Laeken Declaration, achieving substantial consensus on crucial points that had not been resolved during previous Intergovernmental Conferences, such as the division of competences, the conferring of a legal personality on the Union, replacement of the pillar structure of the previous Treaty, strengthening of the principle of subsidiarity, clearer definition of the hierarchy of the Union’s legislative acts, the involvement of national parliaments and a new institutional balance of powers.
The Convention also demonstrated that it is possible to prepare and negotiate European treaties in an entirely new way. The success of the new method is shown by the fact that efforts to reconcile the positions of all the parties involved on the most controversial points were being made up until the very last day.
The final outcome was the drawing-up of a draft Constitutional Treaty that has the merit of gathering proposals and suggestions from all parts of European political and civil society, on the basis of an ambitious plan to bridge the differences that had emerged at previous Intergovernmental Conferences between countries with larger populations and countries with smaller populations and between countries which varied in their readiness to proceed towards even greater integration.
The governments will now have the final word, in accordance with Article 48 of the Treaty. That fact must not, however, make us forget that this is a single constituent process, the first stage of which has come to an end with the Convention; the process is now entering the stage of intergovernmental negotiation and will, we hope, end with the ratification of the future Constitutional Treaty. In essence, then, this is a different kind of negotiation process from that which preceded the Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice. We will have to take this into account when defining the organisational and procedural aspects of the Intergovernmental Conference.
In conducting the work of the Intergovernmental Conference, starting on 4 October, the Italian Presidency’s primary aim will be to keep to the timetable drawn up at the Thessaloniki European Council. This means pressing ahead determinedly to achieve a positive result in time for the European Parliament elections to be held in June next year.
This groundplan has dictated one of the Italian Presidency’s main objectives: to conduct the Intergovernmental Conference at a high political level and to a tight schedule so as to reach a comprehensive overall agreement on the constitutional text by December. It would thus be possible for the Constitutional Treaty – a Constitution for Europe, as President Giscard d’Estaing has described it – to be signed between 1 May 2004, the date set for the entry of the ten new Member States, and the European Parliament elections. Prolonging the negotiations on the Constitution beyond these dates would result in two serious problems of democratic legitimacy and transparency: on the one hand the constitutional legacy of the Convention would gradually be lost, and, on the other, the citizens of Europe would be voting in the European Parliament elections without knowing what the constitutional shape of the future Union would be.
The Presidency therefore intends to safeguard the structure and balance of the draft produced by the Convention. Parliament’s opinion, in the text approved to date by the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, has provided valuable support for our efforts, as have the speeches given by the rapporteurs who spoke before me and strongly confirmed this intention."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples