Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-14-Speech-3-038"
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"en.20071114.2.3-038"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, our fellow citizens – who are also workers, consumers and taxpayers – recognise quite clearly that the European Union, as currently configured, is not so much a bulwark against the excesses of financial globalisation as a staging post on the road to those excesses.
For 20 years now we have been promised a shining future, courtesy of the euro and the dismantling of borders; that is what they dangled before us, for example, to win our support for the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Despite everything, however, our manufacturing base is packing up and pulling out, leaving behind it millions of unemployed, tracts of industrial wasteland and a deserted countryside.
To hear President Sarkozy argue the case, before this House, for a mission to protect Europe, one would almost think he had never accepted either Maastricht or the Lisbon Treaty. It is quite splendid to hear him coming on like General de Gaulle and declaring he will stand up in the WTO against any negotiations likely to damage our national interest. He appears to have forgotten, however, that France does not possess a veto and that the only one doing any negotiating is a Commissioner from Brussels, who consistently disregards the terms of reference given him by the Member States.
Similar illusions were evident when – once again with every justification – he attacked the deflationary obsession of the independent European Central Bank in Frankfurt. But who are we to believe: the man who stands before the TV cameras proclaiming French sovereignty, or the man who abandons our national sovereignty in a European treaty? The reality is that the Lisbon Treaty confirms the logic of the existing treaties, which bar us from steering the course of the euro, from protecting our markets and from standing up for ourselves in global trade negotiations.
Yes, the treaty mentions as an aim the protection of citizens but that is no more than a policy statement without legal force behind it. Significantly, the treaty strengthens the powers and independence of both the Commission and the ECB, with their free-trade thinking. Protocol No 6, and also Articles 3 and 4 of the EC Treaty, reinforce their dogmatic conception of unfettered competition, heedless of national interests, unbridled by borders and careless of democracy.
We believe that the people of France and the people of Europe want something different. So let us rehabilitate genuine free trade, in the form of exchange between nations that enriches them without stripping them of either their defences or their identity."@en1
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