Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-11-Speech-2-019"
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"en.20050111.5.2-019"2
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".
Mr President, the report by Mr Corbett and Mr Méndez de Vigo concentrates almost exclusively on a series of new provisions that are not in the current Treaties. Such provisions include replacing the rotating presidency with a more stable two-and-a-half-year presidency, creating the post of minister for foreign affairs, albeit without communitarising the common foreign and security policy, strengthening Parliament’s powers, according national parliaments the right to call the Commission to account, where they feel it has overstepped its powers, and giving a million citizens the opportunity to propose that the Commission table a draft law on a particular matter.
If the text submitted for ratification by the citizens or by the parliaments were in fact limited to that type of provision, many members of my group – not all, but many of them, including me – would not be opposed to the draft Constitutional Treaty. We are in favour of Europe and in favour of anything that serves to enhance Europe’s democracy and improve its functioning. We should not be bracketed with the UK Independence Party. We feel that there is a great need for Europe in this globalised world, but what guidelines and structures do we need for Europe? That is the question.
The first thing we need, in our view, is a set of guidelines and structures that enable us, at Union level, to control the financial markets, rather than be entirely at their mercy, as we are now. This can be done, provided that it is agreed to make use of powerful levers such as the Central Bank and taxation of the capital of major public bodies; to make laws aimed at holding companies accountable on social, environmental, democratic and ethical issues; to channel funds thus released into major political priorities that are publicly debated, democratically established and regularly assessed. Europe is therefore the appropriate level to meet challenges that a single country would nowadays have difficulty in tackling, due to globalisation.
It follows, for that very reason, that we need guidelines and structures whereby we can reverse the trend of maintaining the main decision-making centres at a distance from the people, and whereby we can reclaim popular sovereignty and the power to make political choices, instead of submitting to the laws of the market, even if that means encouraging fatalism, that deadly enemy of democracy. In other words, to achieve those objectives, Europe is also a relevant level, a level at which it is appropriate to promote the rights of workers, citizens, members of Parliament and the public authorities to access information and to take action, in order to reduce the arrogant power of those who tend to see themselves as modern day feudal lords.
Indeed, if there is a role that we are amply entitled to expect Europe to take on in full, it is that of responsible player on the world stage, determined to use its influence to bring about the introduction of a fresh set of rules governing international relations. Let us consider the potentially salutary influence of, say, a European decision explicitly to ban all recourse to war as a means of solving the world’s problems, so as to ensure that, from the Middle East to the Caucasus, the force of politics prevails over the politics of force. Think of the positive influence of a decision to conclude alliances between Europe and the countries of the south that will extend to include international financial and trade institutions, thereby tackling head-on the murderous onslaught of economic war; or of a decision to establish with the United States, of course, the will to forge – with that great nation and with others – the most ambitious partnership possible, yet within a framework of total political and strategic independence. If you harbour such ambitions for Europe, then perhaps some of you could tell us why, in that case, you are opposed to this draft Constitution.
You are opposed to it precisely because this text takes up provisions accumulated in particular since the Maastricht Treaty, in order to perpetuate them, solemnly and for the long term; provisions that constitute so many obstacles to even the partial implementation of such a European project. I refer in particular to the key principles of the open market economy in which competition is free; to the fact that the European Central Bank can no longer have liberal statutes or a liberal mission; to the Commission’s discretionary powers as regards competition or indeed the blatant subordination of all European security and defence policy to the policy formed within NATO.
New provisions are added to those old ones, thereby widening still further the gulf separating the concept of Europe that is being constructed from the one that I have just mentioned. The draft Treaty thus contains an article which calls, in the fiery spirit of the multilateral agreement on investments, for the removal of restrictions on foreign direct investment and of other dangerously ambiguous articles relating to life patenting or indeed to cultural diversity. In all of these fields, what we need is not a propaganda campaign that brooks no contradiction, but a frank, public, pluralist review of the experience of recent years which has led to a breakdown of trust between the citizens and the European institutions.
As for the report by Mr Corbett and Mr Méndez de Vigo, it does not say a word about the part of the draft constitutional Treaty devoted to the policies and functioning of the Union, which in fact accounts for two thirds of the whole text. We are therefore opposed to this report, just as we are opposed to the draft Constitutional Treaty itself. Once again, however, I wish to make it clear that the ‘no’ that many of us are saying is open to alternative suggestions. It is a European ‘no’."@en1
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