Is Europe to be about treaties or about people?
Extract from Alain Lamassoure’s letter to the President of France on the conclusions of his mission to investigate ‘Citizens and Community law’:
‘Recent referendums and opinion polls confirm that many ordinary people are dissatisfied with the way that Europe works.
One reason for this is obvious: the votes that they cast in European elections do not carry enough weight. The real decision makers in Brussels are the national leaders, who are elected solely on the basis of national domestic politics. As for the European Commission, originator of all Community policies, it comes across as a caucus of learned top-flight civil servants who are a law unto themselves. The Lisbon Treaty will radically transform this system by putting power in the hands of the people: they will elect the real law-makers for Europe (the Members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, which will acquire full legislative authority) and the head of the EU executive (the future President of the Commission).
But that in itself will not be enough. It is time – high time – that the Union put its citizens at the heart of its policy making, for they seem thus far to be merely a secondary consideration, of less importance than the completion of the single market.
The research I carried out in the spring of this year, at your request, Mr President, revealed just how much ground civic Europe must make up to keep pace with corporate Europe.
A particular issue is the fact that, 50 years on from the Treaty of Rome, Europeans who need to reside in a Member State other than their country of origin still face a mass of legal and practical problems, many of which do not even fall within the Union’s field of responsibility.
When relatively few people were affected by these problems they were not of prime importance, but they have mushroomed with the explosion of personal mobility inside the Union. The combined effects of international investment, university exchanges, tourism, the development of low-cost air travel, the transhumance of northern European retirees to sunnier climes and, last but by no means least, the rising incidence of cross-border marriage have brought to tens of millions the number of Europeans leading their lives in more than one country and increasingly regarding the whole of Europe as their living space. These people can no longer be overlooked.
My research pinpointed shortcomings and malfunctioning at every stage in the preparation and application of European laws: from their initial conception and their transposition into domestic legislation, through information for the administrative bodies theoretically responsible and information for the public, to the handling of individual cases and the options for seeking redress, whether informally or in the courts.
It is obvious that we have yet to build a people’s Europe and that it can only be built on a radically new basis: starting at the grass roots, with real people rather than a centralised, all-embracing vision; and starting with the foreseeable future of the young Europeans – our own children – who will have to share this continent, rather than starting in the past or from our current situation, as we have always done before. Such an approach will demand that we overturn our entire way of working and begin to question certain principles or concepts that have, until now, underpinned the development of what is an economy-fixated Europe.
Looking beyond the French Presidency, therefore – although there is also scope for many proposals within that period – we shall have plenty of food for more sustained thought and discussion, particularly in the “Committee of Wise Men” [Reflection Group] that has been established at your initiative, Mr President. The remit to that body from the European Council of 14 December 2007 stipulates that: “Particular attention should be given to ways of better reaching out to citizens and addressing their expectations and needs.”
Alain Lamassoure, 26th June 2008
Pour plus d’informations sur la mission d’Alain Lamassoure et sur ses conclusions, cliquez
ici
.