Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-06-14-Speech-3-049"
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"en.20000614.3.3-049"2
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"Mr President, I should like to add a few words, but not to provide individual answers to everyone who has spoken on this matter. Indeed, the diversity of the statements that I have just heard is fine proof of both the topicality and the sensitive nature of this debate.
Whilst thanking several of you, particularly Mr Karas and Mr Barón Crespo, who have properly understood the thrust of the Commission’s position, I should like to say quite clearly to Mr Barón Crespo, so that there is no ambiguity, that we intend to study all the options and to do so immediately. I expressed this by calling Article 308 a valuable operational procedure. To put it simply, with regard to Article 308 with whose rationale and constraints you are familiar, we need this dialogue within the trialogue. We need this collaboration between the three institutions. We shall try to achieve this immediately but we are working on the combination, which I explained just now, of Article 308, which we feel is an appropriate operational basis – subject to the trialogue and the resulting opinion – and Article 191. After this we will accept our responsibilities – and I repeat this for the second time – and we shall also accept our responsibilities within the framework of the Intergovernmental Conference, at which I promise to fight for the proposal that the Commission will be producing in the next few weeks, as strenuously as you know I can.
The subject you have raised, Mrs Maes, is an extremely sensitive one, and this issue is clearly open to various interpretations. I shall take the liberty of giving you my personal feeling on this matter at this stage. I cannot believe that the political parties that expect to benefit from the new status recognised in the Treaties – if we do indeed achieve these changes for European political parties – are not as a matter of course committed to respecting the democratic values that are the foundations of the European Union.
I respect the opinions that many of you have expressed. I do not think, however, that we should speak, as Mr Vanhecke did, of an “antidemocratic process”. The political parties are united in this very place through you, in joint groups. They consult each other. Outside the European Parliament, joint meetings and demonstrations are held and joint statements are made. Ultimately, we must recognise the true nature of political debate in Europe and give this debate a sounder structure and a clear and transparent legal basis. Considering the matter from this point of view, these changes would represent progress for the general public but also, Mr Dupuis, for the taxpayers, who are generally the same people.
I should like to add or repeat that these European political parties, as they are organised today, on an unsteady foundation, and as they will be organised tomorrow, on a clear and legally sound basis, if we succeed, will not replace the national political parties, they will complement them and will give them a European dimension. By the same token, European citizenship has never replaced and will never replace national citizenship: it complements it and gives it a European dimension.
That is what I wanted to say, Mr President – with a few personal observations, of course – on the reasoning behind the Commission’s position as I explained it just now. This is the basis on which we shall be working in the next few days in order to achieve the best possible results as quickly as possible."@en1
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