Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-03-Speech-4-067"
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"en.20000203.2.4-067"2
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"In the opinion which it has just adopted on the convening of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Conference, the European Parliament calls for a “constitutional process to be launched”. This determination to override nations with a legally supranational text is also expressed in the first meetings of the body responsible for drawing up the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is really a closet constitution. It is expressed again in the unbelievable excess perpetrated by the European Parliament which today in its vote on a resolution wished to cancel out the result of the free elections in Austria.
The same determination to reduce nations to the level of mere administrative regions is also evident on every page of the opinion issued by the Commission for the Intergovernmental Conference. The key idea involves making qualified majority voting the general rule while modifying the content of this qualified majority to make it a double simple majority, of States and peoples, in order to increase the Commission’s room for manoeuvre and reduce that of the minority States.
Incidentally, the French will probably be interested to learn that the Commission is asking for Article 67 of the Amsterdam Treaty to be amended in order to establish majority voting and codecision with the European Parliament. People will remember that this article, dealing with the transfer of immigration policy to the Community level, stipulated that for five years decisions would still be taken by unanimous vote in the Council and thereafter the Council would assess a potential opportunity to amend the system. In France, both in the National Assembly and in the Senate, when this was being ratified, many members of the French parliament were reassured to hear that, in any case, the Council would remain free to choose and could retain unanimous decision-making. Well, today, the same Minister of European Affairs who drew up the Treaty of Amsterdam, who has, in the meantime, become a European Commissioner, Mr Barnier, proposes to decide, at the forthcoming IGC, that the Council will operate in these areas by majority decision. This is the type of mechanism we are continually subjected to when playing the game of European integration with the Brussels institutions.
The French must be made aware not only that the purpose of all these operations is to eliminate their country as a responsible centre for decision making, but that furthermore every means will be used to extract their consent. If they yield, they are lost. For it is their very means of defence which are being eliminated one by one."@en1
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