Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-18-Speech-3-026"
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"en.20030618.4.3-026"2
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"Mr President, the Convention’s conclusions, which are going to be discussed at the Thessaloniki Council, should have responded to one global question: how can we bring Europe closer to the citizens? Yet it is difficult to see how the text proposed responds to the question in any way whatsoever. What is worse, it is clear to see that before long another treaty will be required to resolve the conflicts of power or clarify the obscure procedures the new text wishes to establish, for example in relation to the common foreign policy. However, above all, this text moves in completely the wrong direction. In order to bring Europe closer to the citizens, we need more real democracy. The Convention takes the approach of enhanced supranationality, in other words false democracy, by widely applying qualified majority voting and codecision, without any safety net for the national democracies as such, by establishing a European Constitution superior to the national Constitutions, and by transferring to the Union competences in the area of fundamental rights through the incorporation of the Charter.
In these conclusions, I do not see anything that is going to bring Europe closer to its people, but I do see a great deal that is going to move it further away from them. In the wake of the new treaty, if it follows the Convention’s proposals, we will be in exactly the same situation as before, and the democracy, the understanding, the affection of the people as regards the Union will not have progressed one little bit. If we want to re-establish contact between Europe and its people, and I will say this once more, we must get rid of the feelings of remoteness and powerlessness the people feel in relation to Brussels. There is only one way to achieve this: we must once more allow the national democracies to play an active role in European decision-making, for instance by giving them the right to control subsidiarity or by counterbalancing the Community mechanisms through a right of veto or non-participation that should be granted to each national parliament.
Mr President, all of the timid proposals in this direction have been systematically reduced to nothing by the Convention. One day they will have to be introduced once more."@en1
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