Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-07-Speech-4-120"
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"en.20020207.6.4-120"2
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".
The Napolitano report reflects the traditional view held in the European Parliament on its relationship with the national parliaments: that these are isolationist and content to console themselves with the subordinate role of defenders of fragmented national interests.
This view clearly fails to take into account the fact that the most vibrant level of democracy is that of the nation state, and that to disregard this to too great an extent is also to disregard democracy. The European common good is not decreed from above, from a European democracy that is too weak to be anything other than a kind of technocratic smokescreen, but lies instead in the peaceful dialogue between the interests and aspirations of various national democracies.
There is a point, however, to which the Napolitano report claims, according to the explanatory statement, to have brought ‘an extremely important innovation’: that is, the proposal of some sort of ‘joint constituent power’. This, in reality, exposes the true intentions behind the report’s mollifying proposals: the idea is, in effect, no more and no less, to take away from the national parliaments the exclusive right of ratifying European Treaties and, therefore, of defining the competences of the European Union themselves.
This new ‘constituent power’ would be shared between the national parliaments and the European Parliament, as well as, as is stated in paragraph 21 of the resolution, by the Commission and the governments of Member States, which is truly unprecedented from the democratic point of view.
Such a reform would constitute a serious climbdown. The power to revise the Treaties, not to mention the ‘constituent power’, belongs to the people alone, and certainly not to national or European executives; the people can delegate this power in certain cases to assemblies that have been elected for this purpose, such as the French parliament in the cases specified in Article 89 of the Constitution, but the European Parliament is not one of these assemblies, because no constituent power, or even the revision of treaties, is included in the powers specifically conferred on it by the people."@en1
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