Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-12-Speech-3-028"
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"en.20071212.2.3-028"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to start with the apparently small victory that French President Sarkozy won by getting rid of the word accession from the negotiations under way with Turkey.
It changes nothing of course, the negotiations will continue; however, Sarkozy, who is currently the strongest and the most political of the European Heads of State, as borne out by the speech that he gave to this House, then comes to talk to us about Europe’s borders and the Mediterranean Union and people say rather dismissively ‘he doesn’t know what he is talking about, what is this Mediterranean Union, he doesn’t know what game he is playing’.
In my view, the game he is playing is very clear and concerns Europe’s borders: the Mediterranean Union is the strategy of the Europe of nations. In practice, if the approach were solely one of a relationship between nations, a Mediterranean Union could well be a reasonable way of solving economic, trade, and environmental problems. It is not reasonable, however, and an alternative needs to be found, if we want something else, if we want a Europe of law, of individual rights in particular, a Europe of citizens rather than a Europe of states.
That is the alternative that the Heads of State, the Commission and the European Union must use to counter Sarkozy’s French strategy of a Europe of nations. We have to decide whether we want the Charter of Fundamental Rights, one day in the future, to be the Charter of Rights of Turkish citizens, the Charter of Rights of Moroccan citizens, the Charter of Rights of Israeli and Palestinian citizens; we have to decide whether or not we want to give our Europe such a future, as otherwise the Europe of nations and states will prevail.
To conclude, some people are wearing ‘referendum on Europe’ tee-shirts: yes to a European referendum, no to national referendums, because referendums bring out all the populism, extremism, nationalism and communism of our Europe."@en1
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