Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-30-Speech-4-104"
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"en.20001130.2.4-104"2
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".
I had no hesitation in voting against the joint resolution on the Nice European Council. The voters I represent have no sympathy with any of its policy directions.
This text uses the future (and ever more distant) enlargement of the European Union as a pretext to call for the reinforcement of a system which has already run out of steam. As if that were the only solution! As if on our continent no other form of organisation were possible except the integrationist model, originally designed, need I remind you, for a hard core of five or six countries.
Why seek to find a solution to the squaring of the circle represented by the enlargement of the European Union and the representation of States and peoples in a system which is already saturated, when a different model, that of a Europe of Nations, would provide simple and effective solutions?
Why deny, furthermore, that the democratic alibi of this integrated Europe is nothing but a false nose? An enlarged integrationist Europe is not by nature democratic: in fact it violates one of the most basic of human rights, the right to nationhood. Need we remind ourselves that democracy does not boil down to having a vote? Democracy presupposes dialogue, which in turn presupposes a shared feeling of community, which is often linked to language. Our debates within this Chamber increasingly resemble a series of monologues than real exchanges. Compare them to the vivacity, energy and pertinence of the debates in national parliaments: the members of parliament in the Palais Bourbon, Westminster, the Cortes are able to compare ideas because they are expressed within the same cultural framework and in the same language.
I also voted against a text which calls for the incorporation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights into the eventual Treaty of Nice. This is an ambiguous and contradictory text, open to all sorts of interpretations. It is impossible to claim, as some do, that this text is inoffensive. In the hands of the European Court of Justice – ‘one jurisdiction and one mission’ as one of its judges said some years ago – the Charter may become the most undemocratic instrument to which European integration has given birth.
The Convention which was given the task of drawing it up foreshadows this: the sanctioning of the dominant role of influential groups and activist agencies in the construction of a federal Europe in the pipeline. It is a body which, by its very nature, can find only a minimum consensus on the rights to which the people of Europe are already entitled. It is a body which has produced a text which will not fail to create a conflict of judicial doctrine between the Court of Justice and the Court of Human Rights."@en1
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