Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-16-Speech-2-020"
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"en.20031216.1.2-020"2
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"Mr President, Mr Berlusconi, at the opening of the Intergovernmental Conference, you amused your colleagues with a joke about how you might make the people happy. The punchline is that someone advises you to throw yourself out of a helicopter. We are very glad that you did not do so, but we are not amused by the way you threw out the European Constitution instead.
There are three kinds of failure: you can lose to your opponents, you can fail to achieve goals that are set too high, and you can be your own downfall. The Intergovernmental Conference brought itself down. Nobody was against it. You had the Convention behind you, with an overwhelming consensus of the larger Member States and the smaller ones, the old ones and the new, of parliaments and governments. Only in your own ranks did you have opponents.
Did you fail because you were aiming too high? No, for, apart from the Convention proposals, there was no controversy; even with your 300 amendments, you went nowhere near as far as what the Convention had proposed, and not even as far as the Treaties of Nice.
You were the cause of your own failure. Having been called upon to take responsibility for Europe, you fought for national egoisms; having been called upon to create a balance between the institutions and a European democracy, you tried to build on your own power advantage, and to waste no time in gaining advantages for the national governments. You had the chance to defend the Convention’s consensus – which was the greatest that could have been achieved – but instead you lost it.
There is, I believe, one hope left to us. You, Mr President-in-Office, have tried; the governments have tried – and they have failed. After the partial failure of Amsterdam and the total failure of Nice, they have now, finally, failed. All that we can now do is to appeal to the governments’ sense of reason in persuading them to accept the Convention draft, Europe’s highest common denominator, after all."@en1
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