Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-07-21-Speech-3-010"
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"en.20040721.1.3-010"2
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"Mr President, Taoiseach, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, the Irish Presidency of the Council was active in many areas, not always to my group’s satisfaction and not always successfully, but it is now my happy task, on behalf of my group, to congratulate you, Taoiseach, Mr President of the Council, on the historic and outstanding role you played as chairman of the Intergovernmental Conference that brought about the European Constitution. It was your astute, persistent and calm negotiation in the last six months that made this Intergovernmental Conference a success. It was a success for you, Taoiseach, and for your team.
I also want to express my personal gratitude to you for the way in which you involved Parliament’s two representatives, and its President, in the Intergovernmental Conference’s work. As you know, we had a few difficult stages to get through, but our being able to do so, and do so successfully, is something that we owe not only, but particularly, to you.
Indeed, not everything needed for the Constitution has been achieved, and I have to tell the House that not everything that was achieved was 100 per cent right. You know that as well as I do, as well as many others too. We did indeed have to make compromises, and some of them were hard for us, as representatives of the European Parliament, and for the governments of the Member States, to take. I am sure that you too, as head of the Irish Government, found some of the compromises difficult. It is also the case that some simple solutions that we arrived at in the Convention were made more complicated – there is a large number of supplementary protocols and declarations, restrictions on the one hand and exceptions on the other. That must not be allowed to obscure the big picture, the great achievement of the Intergovernmental Conference.
Although public attention has, over the past months, been focussed on a few contentious points, the Intergovernmental Conference adopted over 90% of the Convention draft, virtually without any debate. In saying this, I am not doing as the former President of the Convention did and counting words; that is nonsense, or, to be less blunt about it, rather childish. Rather, I can see that the structure, coherence and substance of the draft Constitution produced by the Convention have not been touched. That is the first great success, which also confirms the methodology that the Convention adopted. The second is democracy; although there are some deficiencies in that area, the European Parliament’s new status as a legislator with full and equal rights, the fact that the election of the President of the Commission is to be proceeded with in future not only in the light of the European elections, but also following a consultation procedure before the candidates are nominated – that, too, I regard as a success.
You yourself know, Taoiseach, that we, as representatives of the European Parliament, had to draw a red line when it came to the Budget procedure of the future. On a personal level, I am grateful to you for ensuring that we did not reach that red line, but instead were able to come up with a good, workable compromise in the teeth of all those finance ministers who, of all things, wanted to make changes to Parliament’s budgetary rights, and to change them for the worse.
The European Union has greater capacity to act and more transparency. Let me just say two things in general terms. We know that this is not the constitution of a European federal state; it is the constitution of a union of citizens and states, which will always be more than just provinces of a Federal Republic of Europe. The EU is not a copy, at European level, of the European nation-state of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is something
and so we turn a deaf ear to the critics who keep on drawing comparisons between us and the American Constitution, saying that this draft Constitution is far too complicated, too long, and so on. None of that is fair.
We must judge the Constitution in terms of what Europe needs. The Constitution must be judged by whether or not it manages to establish on a common basis the joining together of twenty-five different peoples and states that have plundered, murdered, waged warfare on and devastated one another for centuries. The Constitution must be judged by whether or not it can bring together on the basis of a shared constitution, twenty-five and more European states and peoples, all of which, while being bound together by their political destiny, want to retain their own identity, language, culture, and historical memories.
Our having achieved this is a great and historic triumph in the annals of the European Union, one in which the Irish Presidency of the Council has played an outstanding part. What matters now is that the peoples of Europe, through their parliaments and through referendums, should make the Constitution a political reality. My group, the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, will play its part in this, and we will make sure that Europe gets a Constitution that will take it into the new century."@en1
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