Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-054"
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"en.20001212.4.2-054"2
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"Mr President, I should first of all like to congratulate you on the marvellous stamina that you demonstrated at the Nice marathon. My congratulations must end there, however, as I am sorry that you did not apply this stamina to the subjects that were entrusted to you.
The final result is preposterous. No one understands the operating rules of this labyrinthine system any more. It upsets almost everyone, beginning with those known as the smaller countries. The only clear outcome is that the European nation-states are on their way – unwillingly – to becoming nothing more than provinces within an authoritarian federal state, whose strategic and military objectives appear to be those of the United States. This will happen unless we oppose it. We must bring an immediate end to this insane abdication of the sovereignty of the European Nations. This is why, as far as we are concerned, we will ask the President of France to consult the French people at the appropriate time by means of a referendum on this Treaty.
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You said that the Nice Summit was a success because it finally led to an agreement. I would say to you, “big deal!” because everyone knew from the outset that the French Presidency was set on doing everything to ensure that an agreement was reached in Nice, largely for reasons of domestic politics. I wish to say, at the risk of destroying your illusions, that no one here has been fooled. The obstacles between the Fifteen that multiplied during the Summit are symptomatic. Any clear-thinking person can see that they herald the very serious consequences to which the project of a Federal Europe of 27 or 28 Member States is leading us. The most astonishing thing is that you are cobbling together this pipe dream at a time when the opinion polls suggest that the majority of Europe’s citizens are against this.
Speaking mainly on behalf of the French members of my group, I will say that there is a permanent contradiction between the virtues attributed to this Europe and the aberrations seen in the daily workings of the Union. Europe’s leaders, of which you are one, are reduced to carrying out increasingly frequent operations to manipulate the media and public opinion. The technique is now tried and tested: always put off for another time the burden of proof; take decisions that are void of content or which will not be implemented for a long time and finally present the whole business as a magnificent success. The Nice summit is to some extent the apotheosis of this sleight-of-hand strategy. First of all, the Fifteen signed the agreement on the sly and under the smokescreen created by the Charter of Fundamental Rights. This document is a monument of ambiguity and was presented by some people as a crucial text, which would be a prelude to a future European constitution, and by others, as a simple declaration of intent with no legal force.
This text has been exalted as the democratic progress of a citizens’ Europe but no one has bothered, of course, to find out what the European public actually wants. You yourself, Mr President and your Prime Minister have presented this text as the triumph of French secularism and by Chancellor Schröder as the victory of German religious sentiment. All it took to achieve this was quite simply to have the French and German versions of the Charter not say the same thing. We should have thought about that!
The Nice Summit then adopted a European Social Agenda, but this document has no binding power. It simply sets a handful of objectives for the next five years, which the Member States are free to decide whether to pursue or not, depending on the policies they choose. Then the summit announced that an agreement had been concluded on maritime safety. Hallelujah! Is this a decisive agreement? Not at all. It is simply a decision inviting the Member States’ Transport Ministers to agree on the measures needing to be taken. Let us add to this list of triumphs the announcement of the creation of a food agency that will not come into operation until 2001. To crown it all, the European leaders who met at Nice decided to open a new institutional project in 2004. This will – apologies for it being so minimal – clarify the European Treaties, the precise status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and lay down the distribution of competences between the Union and the Member States.
There is clearly something rotten about the whole business. From evasions to pretences and from hypocritical agreements to sermons on the future, this Federal Europe is beginning to look like a house of cards whose roofs are growing higher and higher but whose foundations are quaking, because the real lesson of the Nice Summit is the enormity of the historical misunderstanding in which our continent has been mired since the Treaty of Maastricht.
The Member States do not have the support of the people because there is no such thing as a European people and they are therefore forced by public opinion to advocate their national interests with increasing fervour, even if this means changing the maximum number of Members of the European Parliament set by the Treaty of Amsterdam, which is already out of date, and even if this means increasing the number of European Commissioners to 27, even though the current Commission of Fifteen does not work.
Mr President, I also wish to emphasise that, after Nice, France appears once again to have been the clear loser. Because you are paralysed with the fear of having fewer seats than Germany in the Council of Ministers, you have definitively capitulated on everything else: on the number of French Members in this Chamber, which is reduced from 87 to 74 – oh, I agree, this would not be a big loss – whereas Germany will keep its 99 Members without losing a single one: at least for the sake of those who believe that this House serves some purpose, the number ought to have been maintained; on the so-called “demographic slice” principle, which gives a considerable advantage to Germany; on one of the two Commissioners in Brussels and on our right of veto in the very many areas concerning our vital interests."@en1
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