Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-10-Speech-1-169"
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"en.20071210.21.1-169"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, it is no secret that we have already failed once with just such an ambitious and necessary project: a European Civil Code. This is also most certainly connected with the fact that some legal systems here in the European Union have difficulty with written law. It is also most certainly connected with some others having difficulty with the idea that substantive rules on related themes are combined to some degree and administered conclusively and comprehensively enough and that ground rules are set outside the parentheses. The difficulties are also related to the fact that we in the European Union have common roots, yet these go way back, some having developed differently, some being buried and some being sacrificed to an arbitrary interpretation for the sake of the politics of the day.
As the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Theodor Heuss, so aptly put it in 1956 – and please note that he was a Liberal – Europe is built on three hills: Golgotha, the Acropolis in Athens and the Capitol in Rome. The Acropolis is the symbol here for Greek scholarship, which with its great philosophers and political thinkers established the core of our democracies and state-building. Golgotha stands for Europe’s social and moral values, spreading widely across every area of our lives, from an understanding of family to human rights. The Capitol typifies Roman law, which helps us on the way to the rule of law and a sense of justice.
As stated, however, our legal practices, while originating from the same roots, have grown apart – often so far apart that these roots are no longer recognisable. The sole foundation of this European Union appears to be the internal market. Some would say that all legal traditions of the nation states can continue to exist. However, this is far removed from any reality and also incidentally from any experience of life, when we live in an increasingly smaller, faster moving and more communicative world. The better we spell out the four Gospels of the Internal Market – the free movement of people, goods, capital and services – the more perfectly we can express them democratically and against a background of European moral concepts, and the clearer it becomes that all this is of no value if we cannot put its form on the test bench of the rule of law and justice, between individuals themselves as well as between individuals and state control.
We have already failed once, when the Iron Curtain fell in Europe and countries were asking: do you have a law for us? Perhaps this was understandable against a background of belief that any ramification of national legal traditions could survive, at any rate in a Union only able to negotiate unanimously. We must not fail a second time, however. This is perhaps the most serious challenge alongside the issue of language. The clearer we are in spelling out our internal market, the clearer the basic need for the unity of the law, not just vertically, but also horizontally over the entire geography of the continent.
We have moved forward. We already have competition now in the legal systems. It would be good, and we would have enough time, if this were not the external reality. Conflict among Europeans can benefit only those who are powerful and already have redundant legal systems. We are not a family with brothers and sisters who quarrel with one another so that sparks fly, but are united in the face of outside challenges. We do not allow ourselves to be fazed by outside challenges. Oblivious to the world – self-obsessed. People’s desire for unity is therefore there, even though it subsequently creates a problem in individual regulations. Fears are created on the basis of the powers of national policies to cultivate doctrines of self-interest – a strategy that threatens the collapse of the historical dimensions on a continental scale.
We have to come to an agreement because otherwise we ourselves will ultimately not hold on to anything. Since the grand plan has not succeeded, we need to agree on what is possible. The toolbox is therefore good, the reference framework is therefore good, and so it is good to sort out what is possible and a little bit more perhaps as well. The European Parliament is therefore largely in agreement and has also repeatedly expressed this in its resolutions. We therefore want to know from the Commission how ambitious it is in wanting to tackle this aim. This is why we are asking questions the way we have.
The Continent and its people require a uniform rule of law, at least in the form … at any rate in what the legal practitioner calls the general part. We can build on this; we need justice in terms of a balanced compromise of legitimate interests, we need speed, law in the public domain and law intelligible to everyone. Even if it is only contract law that is up for debate today, the need for action in other fields is evident: family law, inheritance law, administrative law – yes, even criminal law. It is the method that is on the test bench in what the Commission is now starting. The method will essentially be the determining factor when answering the question of how much, how quickly and how well we are able to react to the obvious challenges. Many of us throughout the world are waiting for a successful example and many are simply expecting us to fail."@en1
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