Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-18-Speech-3-276"

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"Mr President, I shall not repeat the arguments heard today from the rapporteurs and other speakers about the Constitution. Nor shall I refer to the detailed, extensive and exhaustive discussions held last year; I shall refer to the dialogue to which they refer. I wish to express the opinion that the dialogue which we need to hold must revolve not around the Constitution but around the existential problems of the European Union, which are: firstly, the degree to which the European Union is still necessary; secondly, if the European Union is necessary, what type of European Union do we want and, thirdly, how enlarged a European Union do we want. If there is no common answer to these existential questions at the level of both policies and citizens, I greatly fear that no form of Constitution for Europe will ever be acceptable to the citizens of Europe. If and insofar as we in the European Union believe that it needs to be unified and strengthened, then our challenge is to convince the citizens also of the correctness of this way forward. Confidence and faith in the European vision are the basis of the universal consent of states and citizens to constitutional arrangements for the functioning of the European Union. If the citizens of the European states do not realise the importance to mankind of the existence and further unification and strengthening of the European Union, then I predict that no constitutional proposal will be accepted in future. That is why I believe that we should not waste any more time. We need to build on what we have and what we have today is the Constitution. That is what we need to work on and that is what we need to build on, because I greatly fear that any other effort we make to create an alternative will fail and will be a final failure which will be at the expense of the unification and progress of the European Union."@en1

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