Mr President, what a change we have seen from Mr Chirac’s speech of a few years ago! He is a President who in fact started out as an extreme eurosceptic, if I may use such an expression, but today he has made a truly European speech, which was applauded equally by the left and the right in this Parliament. I feel that I must congratulate the Socialist government on having convinced the French President so thoroughly. (Applause) It is greatly to the President’s credit that he used words which sometimes tend to divide us. I am thinking here of the word ‘federalism’, and he said that everything depends on what one means by this. That is precisely the problem with several words that are used in the current debate. The European Union has always had certain federalist characteristics such as qualified majority voting instead of unanimity in decision making within the Council; a directly elected Parliament, an executive Commission which is independent from governments; Community law which takes precedence over national law, amongst other things. All of these are federal characteristics. On the other hand, the European Union is a long way from being a centralised federation, like many of the world’s federations. This is a decentralised federation in which the Member States play an extremely important role in decision-making and remain in control of the Treaties. All this ambiguity means that we should perhaps not allow issues of terminology or theology to divide us, but should instead unite on the specific changes that we need to make to the system. The same applies to the word “constitution”, which can also evoke quite different things. As a citizen of the United Kingdom, a country which does not even have any kind of written or codified constitution, I should like to ask the following question: what is a constitution? This depends on what you mean. People interpret things differently and, with this word too, we run the risk of allowing vocabulary and theology, if I may use that term, to divide us, instead of uniting over the content. To some extent, we already have a constitution, which consists of the Treaties. The Treaties, after all, define the Union’s sphere of competences, the powers of its institutions and the procedures for adopting legislation or the budget. To some extent, therefore, they form a “constitution”. Mr Pasqua defined the constitution as the foundation of a new legal order. Is this not precisely what we have founded in Europe? Instead of allowing ourselves to become divided by the philosophical point of what makes a constitution, we should look at how our present constitution needs to be improved. First, it must be more readable and easier to use by consumers, i.e. the general public. The European University Institute in Florence has submitted a fine project for our consideration, which makes our Treaties considerably shorter, more readable and easier to use, without even altering their content. We must also look at the changes we need to make to our constitution. On this subject, we must above all do what President Chirac suggested, which is to ensure that, in a Union of almost 30 members, there is no risk of action being blocked. This is not really a question of creating a hard core. There is no hard core. What is a fact, however, is that certain areas, or certain States, sometimes create delays, which are sometimes temporary. There is therefore no need to create a hard core and we should instead create a situation in which our constitution prevents action being blocked. We therefore need to strengthen qualified majority voting, to extend it as far as possible, and where this is not possible, to return to the issue of closer cooperation. These are the two crucial points for the IGC. Concentrate on these and above all, do so before enlargement. Do this at Nice then, and not afterwards.

Political group: PSE