HOUSE OF COMMONS
Extract from Hansard 16th June 2004 |
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| Mrs. Angela Browning
(Tiverton and Honiton) (Con): |
| In June 2000, President Chirac made a powerful
speech to the Bundestag in which he called on Germany to join France in leading the drive
towards European integration and asked for a timetable for that process to be set out. He said
that there should be a European constitution in a few years and a pioneer group of European
Union states that wanted to move faster than the others towards closer integration in
political and economic matters. It should therefore come as no surprise, four years later,
that the Government are on the eve of signing up to such a constitution. |
|
The EU Constitution being signed |
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| More recently, the
agenda—the project, as some have described it—was identified as the solution to
the problems outlined in a report that Romano Prodi commissioned and that my right hon.
and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) mentioned. The report was honest
and detailed and described the position of the EU today. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the
former French Finance Minister, chaired the round table of experts who produced it. It
concluded: |
|
| "The European Union has
reached a turning point in its history . . . Its institutions are functioning badly: they
are threatened with paralysis and challenged on the grounds of their democratic deficit.
Its project has run out of steam: today no satisfactory answers are being given to the
questions of why we need Europe and where it is going . . . for the first time, the Union
is having to ask itself where its ultimate boundaries lie"......... |
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| For a complete copy of this speech CLICK HERE |
|
| And for a copy of the EU Constitution
CLICK HERE |
