Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-15-Speech-3-301"
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"en.20020515.10.3-301"2
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"Mr President, sometimes I feel that this House is so preoccupied with its own debates that it has lost sight of what is going on beyond its walls. Across Europe voters feel taken for granted by their politicians; they feel that how they vote makes little difference and that they have next to no control over their own futures. Yet, our response is to offer them more of the same. This report confirms and entrenches the progressive transfer of powers from national parliaments to the European Union institutions. It sets out the areas where the Union should have full or partial control but it offers no commensurate list of matters to be reserved for the nation-states. It offers a mechanism for the extension of EU jurisdiction into new areas, but no equivalent mechanism for the repatriation of powers.
While I fully respect the sincerity of those who support the report, it seems to me that their case is based on two questionable assumptions. First, there is an implicit premise that the very fact of there being an international dimension to some policy area of itself justifies a common European approach. This reasoning may be superficially plausible but I find it specious. After all, the absence of a supranational policy does not mean that the Member States are unable to cooperate one with another. It may well be that multilateral collaboration can produce better results than enforced uniformity.
Second, there is a reluctance to recognise any matter as being exclusively national. But again, the fact that a nation has complete jurisdiction in a given field, does not preclude its working with its neighbours.
The nation-states must be allowed to define certain areas of policy as being essentially domestic in that they have no direct impact on the internal affairs of other Member States. Further, they should have the right to guarantee this judicial supremacy in their constitutions. Just as the European Treaties define the competences of the Union, so the national constitutions should be able to ring-fence certain matters of wholly national concern. I do not have time now to elaborate a full list of these areas, although I have done so in a paper published by the SOS Democracy Intergroup.
The transfer of powers must be allowed to happen both ways: it is dogmatic and wrong to assume that action at Brussels level is inherently preferable to national action. It is this attitude that is widening the rift between those of us in this House and our constituents beyond it."@en1
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