Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-30-Speech-3-074"
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"en.20010530.5.3-074"2
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"Mr President, Madam President-in-Office, Commissioner, it is a great pleasure at this time – when in the United Kingdom I fear a rather negative tone has been taken about Europe – to be able to say how much one welcomes this development of a constitutionalisation of Europe in circumstances of enlarged and expanding democracy bringing the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in. As the President-in-Office has said, it is an odd view that the European Union does not already have a constitution. Of course it does. It has an implicit and not very intelligible one, and the task is to make it explicit and intelligible and properly adopted. That does not necessarily imply a full-scale federation along the lines of Mr Schroeder. Those of us who believe in a confederal Europe believe just as much that it must be marked by respect for human rights, by clarity of democratic principle and by interaction of pluralistic constitutions, rather than a strictly hierarchical model.
Too often in this House we hear the term “nation” used as though it were purely co-extensive with the term “Member State”. It is a well-known fact, to those who reflect upon it, that there are more nations in Europe than there are states. One of the interesting features of our time has been, partly under the guidance of the growth of democracy in Europe, the re-emergence of internal democracies in small ancient nations of Europe like Catalonia, the Basque country, Scotland, Galicia and Flanders.
We in the European Free Alliance hope that the process which we start today will be marked by a respect for subsidiarity in a generous and extensive sense: Amendments No 5 and 18 from the Liberals and Amendment 28 from my own group are for us keystones of this process.
Surely indeed, this Union must recognise subsidiarity in a generous and broad sense, it must acknowledge the political and national diversity of the European Union and the debate on the future must take full account of the powers of the internal political units of the Member States, not only of the Member States themselves. In this election in Scotland, there is a debate going about whether there should be full fiscal autonomy for the Scottish parliament: autonomy is growing in all these small countries and it is vital that it be recognised. I was delighted that the recent statement by the Commission on tax harmonisation made it perfectly clear that there can be wide subsidiarity in these matters."@en1
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