Over the last 50 years Europe has been built along paradoxical lines. Every important initiative was taken by governments, in particular by the Franco-German duo, i.e. by those who had the most to lose in terms of powers transferred to Brussels. Meanwhile, it was only on exceptional occasions that the citizens, who spontaneously supported Europe and had the most to gain, were invited to speak their mind on major issues.

That era is now gone. For the last two years citizens and their representatives have forced their way into the European debate.

The first breakthrough came with the European Convention. It was at that Convention that European leaders tasked the elected representatives of all the EU national parliaments to draw up the first treaty for the enlarged Europe. The outcome has exceeded the most optimistic expectations. The Convention proposed moving from an economic and monetary Europe to a political Europe, from a Union of governments to a marriage of the peoples, and from a system of obscure and rather ineffective decision-making to a more transparent and fully democratic system: in short, replacing an ordinary treaty with a Constitution, with rules governing the communal life of 450 million European citizens.

The second step forward is this: the scope of this text is so far-reaching that a dozen or so countries have decided to hold referendums so that citizens themselves can decide on it. That will be the case in France, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom and even the three Benelux countries, which have never yet held a referendum. It will be the first building block of a real citizens’ Europe.

And so we go on: national leaders realised that it was no longer up to them alone to decide who could join the club. The draft Constitution provides that any new application to join the Union must first be submitted to the national parliaments for their opinion. If any difficulty, such as clear opposition, should arise in any quarter, or any misunderstanding of the kind that emerged because of the clumsy handling of the question of Turkey, it will be dealt with at once and a democratic solution will be found. In the case of France, Jacques Chirac has undertaken to amend our own national Constitution in order to make it compulsory to hold a referendum on the Turkish issue.

Finally, the new European Parliament elected on 13 June this year has brought about a giant step forward in terms of the rights of the citizens it represents. Its new centre-right majority grouped around the EPP – of which our UMP is a member – has been asked to play its part in electing the President of the Commission, something that until now remained the sole preserve of the European Council: it was the European Parliament that in practice imposed José-Manuel Durão Barroso. Then, going even further, and having subjected the candidates concerned to a very detailed and objective public hearing, Parliament requested and obtained the replacement of several proposed national candidates it regarded as unsuitable to act as Commissioners. In this way the, alas, few voters who did their civic duty on 13 June this year got the better of the abstainers: their voice has now been heard at the highest European level.

The next decisive step will be the implementation of actual Constitution itself. If it enters into force, it will mean that European laws can no longer be approved without the agreement of the majority of citizens’ elected representatives in the European Parliament. Better still, the head of the European executive, the President of the Commission, will henceforth be elected by the citizens, through the election of the European Parliament, like the national heads of government of all our neighbours. And the European Union will even offer us, the citizens, a right unknown in France: the right to ensure, by a petition signed by not less than one million citizens, that the European institutions examine and debate proposals in public.

The choice is ours: do we want this democratic revolution to succeed, giving Europe the legitimacy it needs if it is to become a genuine political power, or do we prefer to stick to the diplomatic, technocratic and obscure arrangements of an area of traders and initiates?

Alain Lamassoure, 3 November 2004