Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-15-Speech-3-279"
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"en.20020515.10.3-279"2
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"Mr President, what the citizens want is not so much a division of competences between the European Union and the Member States, but rather the limitation of the competences of that Union, and that is also what the principle of subsidiarity requires. Over the years, the Community structure has become a tangled undergrowth of texts and procedures in which even the most wary can become lost.
My group proposed several amendments which would help to reduce the inflated number of texts and competences. Amendment No 34, for example, proposes that it should be made possible, at the request of one or more States, and thus of their respective national parliaments, to abrogate a text if no majority can be found to confirm it.
My group is very concerned to find that, every time it has been claimed that this clarification exercise is being carried out, the end result is always exactly the opposite. Yet everyone recognises that it is time to respond to the resentment and lack of interest on the part of our citizens, towards a Europe which is involved in too many things at too detailed a level.
This report only makes things worse by proposing to give the European Union the only powers which it does not yet have. Thus it lists all the areas which should fall within the Union’s own competences, the list of shared competences, under the close control of the Commission, the guardian of the Treaties, and the Court of Justice, to which have now been added those concerned with the implementation of foreign policy. As a final precaution a review clause is proposed, modelled on Article 308, so that more competences can be added if necessary. After noting that very little is left, one can understand the prudence expressed in paragraph 17, which does not consider it necessary, unfortunately, to draw up a list of the competences exclusive to Member States.
I believe that, in the last analysis, this report is nothing more than yet another compilation of the claims which the European Parliament was unable to impose in Nice. Europe is becoming a State above States, free to define its own priorities, while there are already too many meddlesome rules, imposed far away from the daily lives of our citizens and preventing the management of territories in accordance with local and national aspirations. We shall continue to support the call for more diversity, proximity and transparency, even if these ‘mores’ seem difficult to reconcile with the ‘More Europe’ slogan of the current Spanish Presidency."@en1
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