Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-26-Speech-4-021"
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"en.20070426.4.4-021"2
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"Mr President, why are the Swiss doing so much better than us? Why is the Helvetic Confederation richer, more content, more orderly and better administered than the European Union? Allow me to suggest a reason. Switzerland is founded on what one might call the ‘Jeffersonian principle’: the notion that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect. The European Union, by contrast, is founded on the converse principle. The very first line of the very first article of the Treaty of Rome commits us to an ever-closer union. Whereas power in Switzerland is dispersed, power in the EU is concentrated, and from that one structural flaw come most of our present discontents: the unintended consequences of our directives and regulations, the inflexibility of our policies, the sense that the government has become remote from the governed, the determination of our national electorates to vote ‘no’ to Brussels at every opportunity.
Why then do we keep bullying and hectoring the Swiss over their refusal to join us? Why do we attack their success in keeping their cantonal taxes down? Why do we encourage that minority of Swiss legislators who see EU membership precisely as a way of sidestepping their voters and escaping their system of direct democracy? Is it that we envy our neighbours their success or is it that we fear that our own citizens will be encouraged by their example to demand independence for their own states?
Let me propose an alternative approach. Instead of seeking to drag Switzerland into our Union, why do our Member States not instead apply to become cantons of their confederation? They are, after all, getting something right, these Switzers!"@en1
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