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DECLARATION OF COMMITMENT FOR A EUROPEAN CONSTITUTUTIONAL ASSEMBLY/CONVENTION
(to be signed by the MEPs)
There is no way out of the current crisis for the Europeans unless they prove able to build a United States of Europe. And this will not be possible without the people of Europe and their representatives taking the field.
Some national governments and political leaders, and even the presidents of the Commission, Council, ECB and Eurogroup, are already developing proposals and projects focusing on the urgent need to: create banking, fiscal, economic and political unions within the eurozone, review the Treaties, convene a convention, and hold a referendum allowing the citizens to decide on Europe. But none of the proposals currently on the table offers satisfactory solutions to the real problem – the one that, ultimately, is making it impossible to make real and decisive progress and that cannot be solved by the governments alone: the question of democratic legitimacy.
The European Parliament, hailed by Willy Brandt on the eve of Europe’s first direct elections by universal suffrage in 1979 as a permanent European constitutional assembly, and by Nobel prize winner Andrej Sacharov as the springboard for supranational democracy, today stands at a crossroads. It has two alternatives: it can, through a strong act of political will, initiate the constitutional process leading to federal union, making it clear that this is the solution to the democratic deficit that is paralysing Europe; or, as proposed by those who want to undo the democratic Europe, it can regress to the status of a mere assembly of national MPs from the member states, thereby ceasing to be not only the expression of the vote of the European people but also a model, for the world, of a system of supranational democratic government, able to tackle the global challenges facing Europe.
Mindful, therefore, of the gravity of the moment and of my personal responsibility as a member of the European Parliament, I
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taking up the constitutional battle started by Altiero Spinelli during the first term legislature of the elected European Parliament, pledge to support
- the formulation, by the European Parliament, of a draft revision of the European Treaties, whose objective will be the creation of a European federation, starting with the eurozone countries;
- the convening, by the end of 2013, of a constitutional assembly/convention composed of representatives elected by the citizens both at national and at European level, as well as representatives of the governments and the European Commission, which will have a mandate to develop a federal Constitution, based on a draft produced by the European Parliament.
