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Verbatim report of proceedings
Tuesday, 4 May 2004 - Strasbourg OJ edition

Towards a European constitution
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  Berthu (NI). (FR) Mr President, it is a great joy for us today to meet one of the key objectives of the original Community, as we welcome into our Union the Eastern European countries freed from the Communist yoke.

Europe is turning a new page in its history, a page full of promise, and yet it will have to revolutionise the way in which it thinks and operates. We have yet to make all the necessary changes in this respect. On the day in which Europe is enlarged to 25, we are still living with institutions that were built on a unitary model retaining something of the old bloc-based Europe, in the way that it seeks power by supranational hierarchy and seeks to abolish national sovereignties.

The draft European Constitution under negotiation is a perfect example of this thinking, and is, consequently, ill-suited to the management of a Europe enlarged to include twenty-five, thirty, or more Members. What we must do – and I hope that the EU will discover this soon, perhaps, indeed, with the help of the new Member States – is to revive the legitimacy of national democracies, and arrange for their experience to be shared and their example to be followed, in the grand European tradition of pluralism, within flexible institutions built on the foundations of free nations.

 
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