Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-11-Speech-2-067"
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"en.20050111.5.2-067"2
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"Ladies and gentlemen, I would invite you to see this Constitutional Treaty in perspective and not as the finished article. The European idea has never been fixed, and it will not now be fixed in the wording of this new Treaty. This Constitution is an important, essential and indispensable staging post, but it is still only a staging post.
Mr Giscard d'Estaing said of this document that it was unhoped-for. I prefer to say of it that, broadly speaking, it can still be improved, given the extent to which, and despite the unquestionable advances it entails, the dross from the previous documents still clings to it.
Our fellow citizens are prepared to live with this document as an interim report on their common history but have no desire to be taken hostage by it for decades, with all movement on what was the European compromise at the beginning of the twenty-first century indefinitely postponed. That is the whole point of Amendment No 17, which I have tabled on behalf of my group and which a great many of my fellow MEPs have co-signed. Through this very clear and very brief amendment, our Parliament, and I quote, ‘[a]nnounces its intention of using the new right of initiative conferred upon it by the Constitution to propose amendments to the latter’.
I would thank our two co-rapporteurs, Mr Corbett and Mr Méndez de Vigo, for having supported this amendment, as it is the medium through which our House indicates that, while remaining forever the driving force of European development, it is attentive to the social and democratic advances awaited by our fellow citizens. If the document were to be set in stone, there would be a danger of the same thing happening to the Constitution too. Moreover, any stone out of which the Constitutional Treaty were to be carved would not, whatever Mr Giscard d'Estaing may think, be that out of which the equestrian statue commemorating the President of the Convention would also be carved. It might, rather, be that marking the grave of the European project.
The Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance would therefore again invite you to embrace a progressive Europe, as the constitutional process is still in its early days, and its strength and interest lie specifically in its newness."@en1
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