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Speech by Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission: The Irish Presidency’s Achievements, Irish Presidency’s report on the European Council of 17 and 18 July 2004,European Parliament, Strasbourg, 21 July 2004. More...
Constitutional Commentary by Peter Sain ley Berry:
A Time For Explanation
With the agreement on the new European Constitutional Treaty now behind us it is perhaps time to explain as clearly as possible what changes are in prospect as a result.
To do this we have to start from the point at which history leaves us which is certainly not at any sort of starting point. What we know today as the European Union is the product of fifty years of growth and development. Its membership has increased from six to twenty-five, the range of issues it deals with has deepened out of all recognition. It has become the largest trading bloc in the world with enormous influence on world trade, it has its own currency - the euro, it participates in international peacekeeping initiatives such as the Middle East 'roadmap' and with its member states it is responsible for more overseas aid than Japan and the United States of America combined.
None of this is achieved without a set of rules and regulations that collectively we might call - for want of a better phrase - the EU's existing constitution. True, these rules are not set down in a single document but they represent a constitution nonetheless. We are not therefore stating with a blank sheet of paper on which can be sketched in a few elegant phrases a whole institutional structure. We start with structures already in place and procedures already documented.
So it is not true to imagine that the EU's new Constitutional treaty represents a step change down the road towards some theoretical end-point of European construction.
It has been called a Constitution - which it is - but it is still an extension and development of what was there before - or, as the Constitutional treaty still has to be ratified, what is here now. The Constitution is cast in the form of an intergovernmental treaty between the 25 member states of the Union, the same framework that has been used to hang all previous agreements between the EU's member states from the Treaty of Rome in 1957 to the Treaty of Nice in 2000. More...
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