Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-07-Speech-4-018"
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"en.20070607.3.4-018"2
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"Madam President, the British Government’s White Paper on the original Constitution said that it involved no fundamental change, but why have a Constitution if you do not want fundamental change? What other purpose could there be? Now we have Angela Merkel saying that the new version should have a new name, but ‘use different terminology without changing the legal substance’. How reassuring to be so vividly reminded of German commitment to democracy and the rule of law!
The old and, no doubt, the new Constitution totally reverses the relationship between the EU and the Member States and between the governed and the governing. Whenever before, I ask you, did a sovereign nation permit outsiders to write and impose a new Constitution on them, except after defeat in war? In my country, the State draws power from the people and it answers to them. The EU plans now that the State seeks to exist in its own right and have the people answer to it. Our rights and freedoms are our birthright. They are not in the gift or at the discretion of a passing parade of political nonentities, here today and gone tomorrow.
The original draft of the Constitution did us a great service. It crystallised the future. It attempted to turn a Europe of nations into a nation called Europe. It forced us to decide if we should allow Europeans to become our masters. We do not. You are our neighbours. You should be our friends, but nothing more.
Whatever its new name, like the last one, this one will not be a Constitution in any real meaning at all. The first was vague, grandiose, imprecise, complex, confusing and extremely long. But more important than any of that, it was proscriptive rather than enabling. It made law rather than seeking to create a framework for lawmaking. It offered no effective checks and balances to control future lawmakers, nor a mechanism to stop the train. It consolidated power for a system of government by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy and it turned the Member States from theoretical masters of the House of Brussels into its servants. What is different this time? This Constitution is not the answer. It is a 1950s solution to 2000s problems and today we live in a very different world. No wonder there is hostility across all 27 Member States."@en1
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