Mr President, at the next part-session, we shall have an in-depth debate on the strictly institutional dimension of the draft Constitution. Then, my group will emphasise what it considers to be positive advances: new parliamentary prerogatives, a willingness to encourage ordinary people to get involved, and certain elements of transparency. It will also express views on other, much more controversial institutional aspects and explain why it is making the case for ratification through referendums. Today, I am going, however, to tackle a more global problem and ask a sort of preliminary question. A constitution is, in principle, a fundamental law determining a country’s form of government. It is also able to lay down a number of benchmark values and fundamental rights. In no circumstances can it aspire to restrict for thirty to fifty years – for that is the lifespan of this document, as promised by President Giscard d'Estaing – the freedom of sovereign nations to choose their own model of society. Democracy means choice. Now, what we have before us, in addition to reform of the institutional system, is a process whereby the model of a liberal Europe is given constitutional status. We thus learn from as early on as Article 3, and I quote, that ‘[t]he Union shall offer its citizens ... a single market where competition is free and undistorted’. On four occasions, there subsequently recurs the liberal theme of an open market economy characterised by free competition. It is, however, precisely against this obsession with all-out competition and against this inclination to reduce the whole of life in society to the level of a commodity that a growing number of our fellow citizens are protesting and mobilising. A factor further to the discredit of the Praesidium of the Convention is the fact that most of the provisions setting up the model of a liberal Europe as inviolable appear in the third part of the document. Unbeknown to most people outside this House, the 340 articles comprising this part – in other words, three quarters of the entire draft Constitution – have not been subject to any discussion within the Convention during the 16 months of work, the results of which were presented to the Thessaloniki European Council. It has to be said that they were added on the quiet and after the event, right in the middle of July so that the majority of editions of the Constitution in circulation quite simply ignore them. That is, as it were, the hidden face of the draft Constitution. It is, however, this part that defines, in particular, economic and monetary policy and the inordinate powers of a European Central Bank obsessed with price stability and the rise in salary costs. In other words, it is the most disputed content of the Treaty of Maastricht that you have thus taken up and perpetuated. These articles also list the drastic restrictions placed upon social policy, as well as upon the conception of public services, tolerated in terms of mere, and I quote, ‘reimbursement for the discharge of certain obligations’ and as departures from the rules of competition and from the provisions prohibiting state aid. Deeply convinced as I am that, now as never before, there is a European need for hope in transforming the world, I think it would be very damaging to provoke, in this way, many anti-liberals into becoming anti-Europeans. That is why I would ask you this question, President Giscard d'Estaing: might nothing therefore change concerning future trends in the European Union, whatever the political developments in one or other European country? Is that not a legitimate question? It is valid in terms of the economic and social dimensions of this project, as well as in terms of its political dimension, since Article 40, for example, foresees the common security and defence policy being, and I quote, ‘compatible with the ... policy established within [the] framework [of NATO].’ Is NATO to be a constituent part of European identity? We can, emphatically, do better in terms of European ambition, the rehabilitation of politics and the promotion of responsibility on the part of individual citizens. As you very rightly stated, never forget the citizens, Mr Giscard d'Estaing. I await your reply.

Political group: GUE-NGL