Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-15-Speech-3-272"
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"en.20020515.10.3-272"2
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"Mr President, I congratulate Mr Lamassoure on his work these last few months and on the remarkable result he has produced.
It means that the European Parliament will be there at the Convention with a set of proposals on the table. We will have done our work in terms of contributing ideas and proposals to the Convention and that in itself is very important. It is important especially if we look at the climate surrounding some of these discussions and debates.
There are those who are alleging that the European Union has become an over-centralised monstrosity; that we need to take powers back to the Member States; that we should define a catalogue of competences specifying in great detail what the EU is allowed and not allowed to do.
This report refutes those arguments. It demonstrates quite clearly, in a very good response, that the competences of the European Union are not over-done: they are, in fact, finely tuned according to the subject. There are some areas where the Union has what could be called an exclusive competence – though that term has been avoided in the resolution. They are quite limited but important. The bulk of the Union's responsibilities are what could be called shared competences, where the intensity of Union action varies greatly from one subject to another. In some areas we lay down detailed legislation – which the Member States have to comply with. In other areas the Union has a coordinating role and in still other areas it contributes with complementary actions. This is flexible and it is adapted to the needs of different policy areas, and should remain so.
The true guarantee against over-centralisation is, and should be, a political guarantee as we consider proposals in the normal procedures of the institutions: from the Commission, as Mr Méndez de Vigo has just said, when it makes its proposals to us as a Parliament, and also the Council. Let us remind ourselves who sits on the Council: national ministers, members of national governments, accountable to national parliaments – not people who are predisposed towards centralising everything in the European Union. Not at all. You have to convince a very large majority of them to get a qualified majority. These are the political guarantees, the procedural guarantees against over-centralisation, and the ministers in the Council can, and should, involve their national parliaments as well. The Treaty of Amsterdam gave a protocol giving a six-week period for ministers to discuss with their national parliaments. That is how national parliaments should be involved, not through some new chamber of subsidiarity or some new institution.
All this is well presented in the report. Where we in the Socialist Group have a reservation is on the legal control of subsidiarity. It exists already: the Court is a constitutional court in many ways. We do not, however, think a new extra procedure – an emergency procedure – is needed, and the wording should be tightened up to show that on shared competences detailed legislation can sometimes be laid down and ..."@en1
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