Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-04-Speech-3-018"
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"en.20030604.2.3-018"2
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"Mr President, the Laaken Summit asked the Convention to bring the EU closer to the people. With the Praesidium’s draft constitution, Chairman Giscard d’Estaing will instead put a greater distance between the EU and the people. A French sun king is leading the Convention in contravention of all the democratic ground rules. We are unable to have proposals translated and debated. The EU rules on transparency do not apply to Chairman Giscard d’Estaing. He is not content with leading the meetings; he also tells us what to think and is apt to draw conclusions that are clearly opposed to the views of the majority. He does not permit any votes that might upset his so-called consensus method, the same consensus method that he now wants to introduce, in place of unanimity, as the European Council’s form of decision-making.
The draft constitution is not progress but a large step backwards in history to the time before the introduction of democracy when the king asked for advice but took the decisions himself.
Chairman Giscard d’Estaing’s draft constitution may be likened to a large removal firm. It would transfer power from the electorate and elected representatives in all the countries to officials, ministers and lobbyists and from the legislature to the executive and judiciary, with the EU Court of Justice becoming the supreme interpreter of the constitution. Power would also be transferred from smaller countries to larger ones and from medium-sized countries to the largest ones. It would be transferred from ordinary party members to transnational party bureaucracies and from living democracies to a stronger Commission, a stronger European Parliament and the strongest power federation of all: the prime ministers of the largest Member States who would be at the very centre of power in the form of a directorate revolving around a French-German axis. They would be given power because of their countries’ size, not because we had elected them. None of them were elected for saying what their plans were for the EU. The prime ministers would, then, meet after each election to the European Parliament and divide the posts among themselves.
When Mr Blair could no longer be elected in Great Britain, he could become President of the EU, and Mr Fischer could become the EU Foreign Minister when his prospects in Germany dwindled. Mr Aznar could be made President of the Commission, or Vice-President with responsibility for justice and home affairs. Someone else could become the EU minister of finance and economic affairs, and a third person could become supreme commander of the armed forces. The constitution would create good jobs for outgoing prime ministers when they could no longer be elected. It would not be the electorate that would be given power over the institutions and their top people, as in federal states such as the US and Germany. In our case, 13 prime ministers could vote down 12 in the European Council, and the prime ministers of the three largest countries could vote down the 22 others in one go on the basis of what is termed their double majority, in which countries with 40% of the inhabitants are given the right of veto.
The electorate in countries large and small would lose all power over the laws. Our democracy would be reduced to something very local. We should no longer be able to reward or punish our elected representatives at the next election, for most laws would be adopted behind closed doors by a working party under the aegis of the Council of Ministers or by the Commission, which would be given increased independent legislative power.
Our national governments and parliaments would be like large, powerless local authorities in an EU writ large. Voters would be able to go to the polls in elections to the European Parliament, but it would not be possible in this way, either, to change the laws of the EU or replace the people running it. The European Parliament would obtain the right of codecision in quite a few areas, but it would not gain all the power lost by the national parliaments. The Commission would be given the sole and exclusive right to table many more proposals and to prevent others from being tabled. That power would be taken away from voters and elected representatives in all the countries. Officials and Council ministers would assume most of the power, for without their consent it would not be possible for any laws to be made. The power that, in all democratic countries, resides with the electorate would, in the case of the EU, be apportioned through an inscrutable power game involving prime ministers, meetings of the Council and of the Commission and a European Parliament potentially dominated by powerful supranational party bureaucrats.
As for the electorate, it has an extremely remote role to play in the draft constitution to be debated at the Thessaloniki Summit. Greece was the cradle of democracy, Mr President-in-Office of the Council. The Thessaloniki Summit ought not to become a burial chamber."@en1
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