Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-17-Speech-1-046"
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"en.20011217.3.1-046"2
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"In my view, the European Summit and the Laeken Declaration proved, in fact, to be a fitting sequel to the Belgian Presidency. It became a catalogue of hollow phrases, of nothingness, of unanswered questions. It is very characteristic of the state of affairs in today’s Europe that, actually, only someone like former Commissioner, Mr Van Miert, dared to put his finger on the wound. What Mr Michel ventured to call the ‘Grand Cru Verhofstadt’ ultimately turned out to be a cheap table wine.
So there will soon be a Convention which is supposed to give a democratic face to an enforced federal Europe. But surely this Convention cannot cover up the fact that our institutions are systematically riding roughshod over the subsidiarity principle, that extremely drastic measures are taken without prior referendums, and even that the European Union is once again flouting the sovereignty of the Member States at this summit, for example by again callously ignoring the results of the Irish referendum.
Apparently, European democracy suggests that citizens preferably have no say, and if they do, they have to carry on voting until they agree with what the eurocracy has decided, as was the case in Denmark and is also required from Ireland.
The President-in-Office of the Council, Mr Verhofstadt, may well go down in history, albeit as the man who took things to such extremes that even Commission President, Mr Prodi, refused to hold any more press conferences with him, as the once pro-Flemish politician who refused to protect the Dutch language, as the man who abandoned all his principles, who was once known as the advocate of slimmed-down government and of deregulation but who became the partisan of European centralism exercised by a superstate and who turned inventing little rules into a kind of Olympic discipline."@en1
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