Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-10-Speech-3-014"
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"en.20040310.1.3-014"2
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"Mr President, on the eve of the Spring European Council, opinion polls indicate that a majority of those questioned are indeed – as Mr Barón Crespo said – in favour of a European constitution, but it has to be added that they say so without having the least conception of what the legal definition of a constitution is, nor of the precise content of the one that has been drawn up. We can therefore draw the conclusion that these people are in favour of the idea of clarifying relations between the EU and its Member States, but there is certainly nothing more that we can learn from this.
On this basis, and following the statements just made by the Council and the Commission, as well as those made by Mr Giscard d'Estaing to the Committee on Constitutional Affairs yesterday, we can perceive the outlines of a federalist strategy, which I would regard as repugnant, and which can be described in the following terms. A principled compromise is announced just before the European elections; this makes a favourable impression on the electorate, who will go to the polls without having had any real debate on a written draft; finally, if the outcome of the elections appears to be sufficiently favourable to the advocates of a constitution, it is announced that these elections would be seen as equivalent to a consultation, and that such consultation made a referendum unnecessary. Paradoxically enough, this strategy would end up distorting democratic debate at the same time as it was declared that the old Monnet method had become obsolete for lack of transparency.
The European elections cannot function as a substitute for a referendum; they combine far too many different issues and their results would be far too confusing to allow any message to be validly discerned from them. If the Heads of States really had, immediately prior to the European elections, agreed on a draft derived from the Convention’s version – which would be too rigid a model for an enlarged Europe, and something that I would not welcome – then the only way forward, in France at any rate, would be to call a referendum on it."@en1
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