Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-07-02-Speech-3-027"
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"en.20030702.1.3-027"2
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"Mr President-in-Office of the Council, having welcomed, as is only right, your taking over the reins of the European Union, I must immediately express profound disagreement with the main emphasis you intend to give to your Presidency: that of positioning the European Union in the wake of the United States of America. The peoples of Europe do not want this and demonstrated as much during the war in Iraq. Nor is it the option favoured by the European institutions. Following the example of Parliament, commitment to a multilateral world under the aegis of the United Nations rather than that of the United States has been expressed by the Commission in the shape of Commissioner Patten and Mr Prodi – the former hardly a dangerous left-winger, the latter perhaps a little more in that vein – and even by the Council, or at least to all appearances.
What Europeans are waiting for is the affirmation of their own European identity. Public opinion has come into its own on this matter, Mr Berlusconi. Do not disappoint it. What, indeed, would be the use of this would-be constitution which, whether it be a source of delight or indignation, is a considerable leap forward in the direction of European sovereignty, if our continent were to end up becoming the handmaiden of the US empire? Mr President, given that this treaty is to be signed in Rome at the beginning of May 2004, I hope you will be very keen to propose to your colleagues in the Intergovernmental Conference that the peoples of Europe, as sole wielders of sovereignty and, therefore, as those who alone are in a position to relinquish such sovereignty, should vote on this Constitution in a referendum.
Finally, the Ministerial Conference of the ‘World Commercial Organisation’ – a name I think is more apposite than World Trade Organisation – will be held in Cancun during your Presidency. In the same spirit, I do not want this meeting to be the opportunity for our old Europe, to which we are ultimately rather attached, to sacrifice its cultures, its ways of life and its Community on the altar of unrestrained free trade. Already, our agriculture has been more or less remodelled in accordance with the rules of the World Trade Organisation. I fear that our cultures, our identities and our specific character, which has, moreover, given birth to world civilisations, might suffer the same fate."@en1
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