Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-03-Speech-3-045"
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"en.20030903.4.3-045"2
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"Mr President, please do not imagine, because of the brevity of some of what I have to say, that I am being in any way malicious. It is simply that I have a limited amount of time in which to speak.
I should like first of all to say that no midwife, be it in the field of obstetrics or politics, has the ability to get rid of congenital deformities. Whatever the intellectual virtues of the Convention and of its President and of those of our eminent fellow MEPs who have taken part in this work – most notably the vice-presidents of my group, Mrs Muscardini and Mr Queiró – it was certainly very naïve to believe, or to lead others to believe, that a European Constitution might in itself permit the transformation of a technocratic European structure into a democratic political body.
Everyone agrees in thinking of the European Union as a democracy. If there is in fact to be a constitution, it can, therefore, only proceed from the constituent power, that is to say the sovereign people, and it can only be ratified by that same sovereign people. Now, where is the constituent power? No one in this Convention has been given the slightest popular mandate to devise a constitution, and I am also surprised to hear members of the Convention, including the most eminent among them, say that no modification whatsoever to the document that has been drawn up would be acceptable, either at the Intergovernmental Conference or, even, at European Council level. That is an outrageous claim.
Given the importance in principle of a constitutional document, I would add that only a referendum would be able to legalise this great institutional change in the EU. What referendum, however? Of necessity, a European referendum, that is to say a consultation organised on the same day in each Member State. Apart from the fact that the referendum procedure is not anticipated in all the Member States, how, in any case, would the outcome be assessed? At European level as a whole? At national level? In that case, what would happen if the majority of people in a single Member State voted ‘no’? No satisfactory answer has been given to any of these questions. A political impasse has been reached, since the two questions upon which success depends have not been asked. How is the power of the populations to approve or reject the stages of this construction to be preserved? Moreover, do the peoples of Europe want to construct an independent Europe capable of influencing the balance of world power?
That is what I wanted to say to you on behalf of a group united in its diversity. Let us, therefore, keep our feet on the ground and stick with the principles forming the basis of genuine European integration: the peoples and the nations."@en1
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