Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-11-Speech-2-158"
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"en.20050111.10.2-158"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank Mr Corbett and Mr Méndez de Vigo, who really have produced a masterpiece, making the Constitution more readable.
The ancient Roman jurists used to say: ‘
’ (the law arises out of the fact). Well, from the first day that Europe’s founding fathers began to dream, began to imagine this common entity – a single entity drawing together millennia of history, geography, society and common values – well, from that moment the founding fathers themselves thought of having common rules: what we today call the Constitution.
This is why I am extremely disappointed this morning to hear prominent fellow Members, whose freedom of expression I clearly respect, stating their opposition to the draft Constitution. People may oppose this form of Constitution or the content of the Constitutional Treaty, but not common rules, since the establishment of these rules strengthens sovereignty.
Today we have to reach an agreement in a world undergoing fundamental changes, including with regard to its systems and new semantics: those whose idea of sovereignty is as it was conceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are mistaken. Today the new concept of sovereignty lies in subsidiarity: it is the sovereignty of local identities, the sovereignty of citizens, the sovereignty of those who must help construct a legal system to interpret in the best possible way the ever more varied and complex needs of an evolving society. We cannot conceive of using the terminology which the jurists taught us: federal state, confederal state, sovereign state: Europe is a new entity, a Union, precisely, with which we must all identify.
Lastly, I would like to express my regret at the lack of a reference, not just to our Christian roots, but also to Periclean democracy – the origin of the very essence of democracy – to the Roman Empire and to Carolingian Europe. Let us hope that during the process of European integration these things will be remembered."@en1
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"ex facto oritur ius"1
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