Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-018"
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"en.20030924.1.3-018"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, zealous advocates of the Convention want the new Treaty signed on 9 May next year, the anniversary of the 1950 Schuman Declaration. Let us heed Robert Schuman carefully, though! His exact words are these: ‘Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a
solidarity.’ I repeat: it will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a
solidarity.
Now let us see what we have on the table. We have a Convention, to produce which, Mr Giscard d’Estaing told us here, 1 800 speeches were made and thousands of amendments proposed. There was not one vote, however. Not a single vote. This process was not democratic either in principle or in practice, and it far exceeded its mandate. What would it mean, then, if the Convention’s conclusions were imposed as final, as the rapporteurs would like, riding roughshod over the powers and responsibilities democratically granted only to the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC)? It would mean a blow against Robert Schuman.
Let us cast our eye once again over the Convention’s text, which, say its supporters, should be forcibly enshrined as the Constitution. What do we see there? We see an attempt to make Europe ‘all at once’, upsetting a long-established balance by means of a new ‘single plan’. Another blow against Schuman. Let us remember, moreover, what happened some weeks ago at the IGC planning meeting in Riva del Garda. Various Member States, various countries expressed major reservations about the Convention text. The Union for Europe of the Nations Group has incorporated those reservations into the amendments it has tabled to this report, on the composition of the Commission, the Presidency, the role of Christianity, and so on.
These criticisms received a blunt response from Mr Oskar Fischer in the form of the financial forecasts for 2007-13. The press correctly interpreted the German minister’s threat as ill-judged budgetary blackmail. What does this amount to? It amounts to a negation of the ‘concrete achievements’ which gradually ‘create a de facto solidarity’. That was precisely what Schuman was advocating on 9 May 1950.
The united voices of my group, therefore, urge the IGC to look to Schuman’s method for its true inspiration, never forgetting 9 May. I would appeal to the Italian Presidency, therefore, not to kowtow to threatening language, to restraints, to blackmail by Member States, and rather to encourage free, equal and open debates. Our responsibility is to prevent the haste and pressure of a few from destroying, against the grain of democracy, the magnificent edifice whose foundations were laid by the Treaty of Rome."@en1
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