Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-06-Speech-3-160"
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"en.20020206.8.3-160"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, since the outset, Europe – well, what we call Europe in actual fact means the quasi-State, which passes legislation in Brussels and occasionally in Strasbourg, which hands down justice in Luxembourg and which produces currency in Frankfurt – is desperately seeking some legitimacy, a lack of which means its existence is in question. The best evidence of this lack of legitimacy is that the people of Europe, when they are consulted, send this Europe back to the drawing board, as the people of Denmark and Ireland forcefully, and on successive occasions, did not long ago.
The report by Chairman Napolitano, whom I would like thank, seeks the answer to this existential question that we occasionally deliberate (and that we could term ‘democratic remorse’) in a sort of hybrid parliamentarisation, a risky experiment where the national parliaments and the European Parliament bargain between them in a sort of democratic no man’s land that is both vague and opaque. Mr President, Commissioner, legitimacy can only be conferred by the people themselves, when they are directly consulted, and cannot descend in the manner of the Holy Spirit out of such a distinguished Areopagus as our future Convention and, even more so, its praesidium, the most recent embodiment of what used to be called out-and-out despotism. European integration must involve the people and not the institutions. If it fails to do so, what we are continuing to call Europe will remain an increasingly foreign abstraction to Europeans, as the latest Eurobarometer has just demonstrated in a compelling manner."@en1
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