Commentaire: Vaclav Klaus - Le retour à l'Europe intergouvernementale

Les deux rejets de la constitution offrent une chance à ne pas manquer, explique le président tchèque Vaclav Klaus qui voudrait voir l’UE faire marche arrière sur quelques unes de ses politiques d’intégration.

The pause for thought that EU leaders gave themselves at the EU summit in June 2005 after the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitutional treaty, has not been dragged out unnecessarily by Czech President Vaclav Klaus. The well-known eurosceptic fires the opening shot of the long debate to come in a comment in Financial Times, 30 August 2005.   

He writes that the « systematic undermining of the former inter-governmental nature of relations between countries » were undermined from the 1980’s and onwards. « Critical arguments were not taken into account by the political elites and their fellow travellers. They have always considered themselves an infallible avant-garde, selected by history to lead the confused masses, » barks Klaus.
He calls for « a real discussion » 

« We must first make clear what kind of Europe we want. Using understandable language, we have to say what the future Europe should look like and what costs and benefits such a solution would have. It must not be about turning in on ourselves. It must not be about hindering spontaneous integration or globalisation processes. No costly, freedom-constraining uniformity, unification, harmonisation and centralisation should be part of it, nor any obligatory “European” ideology »  

Klaus thinks that is is unavoidable that the urge to produce a new document will come back: « Constructivists of all colours will not leave us alone and that “their” constructivism needs to be countered by the European majority that opposes centralisation. Sooner or later a new constitutional document will have to be created. »

Klaus revives the old idea of a catalogue of competences, that was rejected by the convention that prepared the Constitutional treaty: « Such a document would help us define the barriers and thus prevent creeping unification and centralisation. It cannot be a document directed solely towards the future and accepting everything past as sacrosanct. It must start by abandoning a lot of what has been done in the past two decades. It must be about finding a new balance between freedom and dirigisme, the private and public, the unregulated and regulated, the domestic and inter­national, the neighbourly and supra­national, the national and European. »