Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-263"
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"en.20070523.20.3-263"2
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"Mr President, Prime Minister, on the television a few days ago, a young Dutchman said, on being asked about the European Constitution, ‘What do we need a Constitution for? This is an economic area.’ I found myself wondering how it is possible for a young man in the Netherlands today, in a country that was a founding member of the European Community, was one of the first to embrace the idea of creating a politically united Europe, and had undertaken to overcome nationalism – how it is possible for such a young man not to know that this is a political union?
To that question, you have today provided me with the answer; a government that seeks to remove a symbol, to remove a flag, seeks to do away with an idea, to hide it away, to make it disappear. Take away the rhetorical flourishes and polite formularies, and your speech today is an ice-cold, nationalist, declaration of war on the idea that that flag symbolises.
Let us consider the various points in it, the primacy of European law, for one. It appears to me from the utterances of your foreign minister that the primacy of European law is no longer to feature in the Treaty, although, at the same time, he does emphasise that the primacy of European law is not to be tampered with, which means that he and you are deceiving your own people and lying to them by not having the Treaty state what the actual nature of this Union is. You are trying to conceal it, for the primacy of European law will remain intact, and well you know it. You want to go back to regulations rather than laws, but I ask you, Prime Minister, what does that title signify? Law has nothing to do with the nation state; republics have had laws, and laws have been in existence for as long as human beings have. It is laws that, when enacted through parliaments, serve as a guarantee to the citizen of democratic legitimacy.
Prime Minister, having listened to your demands and understood your thinking, I was grateful that you were, firstly, willing to talk to us, and, secondly, did not also want to do away with this House or rename it, for this House embodies supranational democracy in the shape of the federal and political Europe; by its very existence it assures people that they are living as citizens of a political community rather than in an economic organisation or an association of states.
A constitution has nothing to do with being a nation state; it is the basic law of a political community. Not least in the Treaty that we will soon have, there are such things as European citizens, and European citizenship is a real thing; we are here in the parliament of a supranational democracy and of a European citizenry. If you take the Charter out of the Treaty, while making it explicitly binding in law, what are you thereby doing? You are engaging in the same old deception, hiding it away from the people, while leaving it effective in law, which means that you accept the reality of Europe where you have to, while nevertheless denying it. I have to tell you, Prime Minister, that neither the twenty-first century, nor Europe itself, are going to be won over by a lie."@en1
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