Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-05-Speech-3-400"
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"en.20010905.12.3-400"2
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"Mr President, yesterday I was in this House addressing the issue of the European Aviation Safety Agency when I noted that the means by which it was being achieved was through the gradual integration of the national systems. Naturally, as you would expect from me as a leader of a party that puts national sovereignty above the integrationalist tendencies of the EU, I strongly object to this process of gradual integration.
Today, under the different heading of reform of competition policy I find that I am confronted with exactly the same thing – yet another attempt by the Commission to achieve the gradual integration of national systems. But what makes this attempt particularly sinister is that it is being sold under the beguiling and wholly misleading claim that the reform is – I quote from the session’s news briefing – “to free hard-pressed Commission staff in the Competition Policy Department from routine matters to enable them to concentrate on major cases of non-competitive behaviour”.
Although giving Commission officials an easier life might be one effect of this proposal, the way this is being done is to give national competition authorities limited powers to enforce the competition rules hitherto the monopoly of the Commission.
But these authorities are neither independent, as it is claimed, nor free to act. They are being granted licenses to act for the Commission in accordance with Community rules, under the supervision of the Commission and responsible to it. The Commission wants the competition authorities to form a network at the centre of which is the Commission. In other words, the Commission wants civil servants in the different Member States, paid salaries by the Member States, in government buildings paid for by the Member States, using facilities provided by and paid for by Member State governments, to work not for the Member States which finance them, but for the Commission implementing Community law.
Amazingly – and it is a reflection of how superficial is the view and understanding of so many commentators – this is seen and presented as subsidiarity and decentralisation. It is anything but decentralisation. It is the opposite, absorbing the civil servants of many countries into one vast centralised nexus. That is what the network is: everyone working for the one central authority – the Commission.
As for subsidiarity, this is not a matter of Member States being able to make their own decisions and run their own affairs at local level. This is the Commission running Member States’ affairs, using the resources and the facilities of those Member States as if they were its own.
That state of affairs, it seems, also applies to the courts which will hear the cases in Member States. Although they may nominally be the courts of the Member States and their running costs are paid for by the Member States, they are – as the draftsman so clearly reminded us – courts of Community law underlying the whole Community judicial system. In other words, not only are Member States’ civil servants being absorbed into the maw of the Community, but the courts are too.
All this is being done in the name of efficiency. It should be remembered that the most efficient form of government is the centralised dictatorship. The least efficient is the democracy. In important ways, therefore, efficiency is the enemy of democracy.
I fear that in the supposed interests of efficiency we are surrendering something much more valuable – the very democracy at the heart of all our nations – to the centralised technocracy which is the Commission. This is not so much integration as assimilation. It will all end in tears."@en1
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