Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-04-Speech-3-268"
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"en.20020904.8.3-268"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I could not begin without paying tribute to the magnificent work done by Carlos Coelho and thanking him once again for the openness and the willingness with which he accepted two proposals from our group in the specialist Committee, enabling them to be adopted in compromise versions which were agreed on.
Mr Coelho’s report is the necessary and appropriate complement to the third Commission report, giving it a crucial political meaning that is well expressed in the motion for a resolution, on which we shall be voting tomorrow. The report and the motion for a resolution address the matter adequately, dividing it into various strands with regard to the political, administrative, and judicial dimension, and lastly, into the strand of promoting European citizenship, which contains proposals for various practical actions. I do not wish to add anything to this, either in terms of the report’s analysis, or of the motion.
We do have something to add, however, to the discussion, particularly when the Convention is up and running and the future of Europe and institutional reform are being so widely debated. It is true that we must work on promoting European citizenship and full understanding of this by our compatriots, our fellow citizens. The fact, however, that, ten years after Maastricht, with so many direct elections to the European Parliament having already been held and so many actions having been undertaken to promote and disseminate the European framework, on which enormous quantities of money are spent every year, after all this, the State of European citizenship is as portrayed by the Commission report and justifies some of the rapporteur’s complaints, forces us to keep our feet on the ground and to build the future with our eyes on the horizon – not as far into the horizon as the visionaries would like, but as far as the reality of the situation requires.
The real state of European citizenship – as demonstrated, for example, in the symptomatic low levels of electoral participation – shows, as the motion for a resolution points out and emphasises in line with the Treaty, that 'European citizenship shall not replace national citizenship, but complements and expands it'. In other words, and we must always bear this in mind, European citizenship is, for the overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens, a complementary citizenship, because it is the central place spontaneously occupied by the most intense sense of belonging and of identity with national citizenship.
The reasons for this inescapable fact are many and profound. And so the future of Europe will only be achieved properly if this factor is borne in mind. Provided that we do this, we shall be constructing something – with the solidarity of the nations and the genuine democracy of the citizens. We shall be constructing something with a future, because it will have roots. When we distance ourselves from this goal, however, because we want to continue sleeping easy, we shall be opening the way to nightmares and to creating points of conflict, tension and disillusionment that will undermine the European project. Because we shall be giving in, ultimately, to the pressures of a new type of collectivism – multinational collectivism – and thereby distancing ourselves from democracy, affronting genuine citizenship and replacing that Europe of all citizens, of which we all dream, with bureaucratic jiggery-pokery.
European integration can be achieved by respecting the feelings of the citizens, and will be more secure as a result. It must never be done by overriding these feelings and must be done preferably together with the citizens. The Convention must also not forget this."@en1
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