Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-02-Speech-4-179"
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"en.20090402.35.4-179"2
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"Mr President, this resolution recalls the horrors of Fascism and of Soviet Communism. No European, no child of Western civilisation, no civilised human being could disagree. But it then goes on to posit the European Union as an alternative or antidote to such totalitarianism. It reads: ‘the European Union has a particular responsibility to promote and safeguard democracy, both inside and outside the European Union’.
It is here, my friends, that you make your bloomer. The European Union is not safeguarding democracy, either internally or externally. Abroad it is doing business with Castro’s Cuba, with the Ayatollahs in Tehran; it is demanding the right to sell arms to Communist China. At home it is striking down referendum results when they go against closer integration.
Now of course, one has to be careful making such parallels. No one is arguing that the European Union is a Soviet system that takes away people’s passports or runs Gulags or operates show trials. But it should deeply worry us when any system claims that the ruling ideology is too important to be subjected to the ballot box."@en1
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