Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-11-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20050111.5.2-016"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this coming 27 January will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community a few years later was a direct consequence of what had happened during the Second World War. The fathers and mothers of European cooperation could see with their own eyes that ultra-nationalism, Fascism, and the division of our continent by Bolshevism, always resulted in oppression, in terror, and in the dignity of the individual being lost. They could also see that what created peace, dignity and democracy was supranational action and integration at a supranational, European level. It is worth adding that this was then achieved through the Coal and Steel Community gaining control of the weapons-manufacturing industries.
If you trace a continuous line from the ECSC to the European Economic Community, through the next act of integration to the European Community and then to the EU as we know it today, you find a success story as yet unequalled in the world, for it looked not only to 1945, and to the end of a war of destruction on this continent; the next stages incorporated states that had, in the post-war era, had their own political changes to cope with, namely Greece, Portugal and Spain, and so the overcoming of their fascist dictatorships and the stabilisation of democracy through membership of the European Community was an enormous success in the late 1970s and 1980s.
What we saw happening in the 1990s, when the states that have now acceded took their present form, was, in principle, a triumph over Communist oppression in one part of Europe. The European Union is a union that has managed to take the values described in our Charter of Fundamental Rights and use them as the basis of democratic integration and to overcome both the Fascism and the Communism of Europe’s past.
The events of recent days, in which people have been powerless in the face of forces that no amount of technology has enabled them to confront, show how absolutely necessary it is for action to be taken at the supranational level, with no national borders standing in the way. In the global village, the European Union is Europe’s rational and modern response to the challenges of the twenty-first century. The Constitution we are now debating is the framework provided for it.
Our group will be voting in favour of the Corbett/Méndez de Vigo report – out of profound conviction, and also out of the conviction that the values described in this constitution are civil values. The splendid thing about them is that you can understand them as Christian values if you are a Christian. You can understand them as your own values if you are a Jew or a Moslem or an unbeliever. These values are universal and indivisible, and so they are valid for everyone.
That also makes it easy for us, despite the divisions that otherwise separate us, to join together in supporting this Constitution, but if we do that, it is our shared basis for a democratic and dignified future in a social community with social responsibility and economic prosperity. In the knowledge-based society of the future, this Union of ours must, at one and the same time – and the Constitution does indeed set this out in black and white – perform its social tasks and guarantee the protection of the individual and of every citizen from the dangers present in this divided world.
That is what this Constitution will be able to achieve, and we are largely agreed that we are willing and obliged to stand up for it and contend for it. One thing alone is lacking, and, speaking for our group, I will spell out what it is. For the European Parliament to commit itself and mobilise itself is not enough. Those who signed their names to this Constitution at the dignified ceremony in Rome, which all of us chairmen of groups were allowed to attend, Europe’s Heads of State or Government and foreign ministers, must, in the same way as we do, appear before the peoples and declare that this is our Constitution and that we want it. Far from this being one individual matter to be left to the European Parliament or to the Commission, the statesmen and stateswomen of Europe must do their part and affirm this to be their work – not only the work of the European Parliament or of the Convention on their own. It is those things too, but it is the work of all those who carry responsibility for Europe’s future, and they must affirm, before the peoples of Europe, their support for it. If they do that, this Constitution will enjoy majority support, with the support of the PPE Group and probably even of that Group’s European Democrats."@en1
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