Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-19-Speech-3-184-000"
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"en.20110119.20.3-184-000"2
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"Madam President, thanks to your staff and all the interpreters for your patience during this unusually long session.
Faced with a choice between democracy and supra-nationalism, the European Union almost always opts for supra-nationalism and nowhere is this clearer than in its policy in the Western Balkans. We are maintaining to all intents and purposes protectorates in Bosnia, in Kosovo and arguably even in Macedonia, for the sole purpose of preventing ethnographic boundaries along the lines of what local people there would choose.
It is very difficult to have a functioning democracy unless people feel enough in common with one another to accept government from each other’s hands. If you want government for and by the people, you have to have a people that everyone recognises some identity with, some allegiance to.
To put it in another way, democracy needs a ‘demos’, a unit with which we identify when we use the word ‘we’. I am not saying it is simple. People can sustain multiple loyalties, populations can be interspersed, but our prejudice, other things being equal, should be towards national self-determination. If you take the ‘demos’ out of democracy, you are left only with the ‘kratos’, with the power of a system that must compel by law what it dare not ask in the name of civic patriotism."@en1
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