Blogue ELDR

Dick Roche, ELDR Vice President

ELDR unites nearly 60 political parties from across Europe.

The ELDR is the European political party that promotes the liberal values of freedom and individual responsibility, democracy and the rule of law, respect for human rights and tolerance, a market economy and a democratic, strong and efficient European Union.

These principles led me to bring my party (Fianna Fail) into the liberal group.

The ELDR is growing in significance. It the third largest at the European level, with 8 European Commissioners and 84 MEPs in the European Parliament sitting in the ALDE Group. Parties within ELDR lead governments in four EU member states and participating in the coalition governments in many more countries.

Freedom and Solidarity is a member of the ELDR since October of 2010. Your sister Parties within the ELDR ‘family’ are proud that your successful party is a member of the European Liberal Democrats.

As many of you probably know I am a passionate supporter of European project. I subscribe, as does my country and my party to the objectives of the European Union.
It is important if our Union is to survive and to prosper that it remains true to the founding principles on which it has been built.

One of the key principles on which the Union is built is the principal Solidarity, another is the principal of subsidiarity and a third is the principle of conferral - the European Union only has those powers that the member states have given it.

The 27 member states that make up the European Union have, in their wisdom, over the years, enacted a series of treaties which enshrined these and other principles.
It is critically important that the leadership of the member states adhere to the spirit as well as the letter of those principles.

The so-called Community method has served the people of Europe well and must be preserved.

I am gravely concerned that in recent times we have seen departures from each of these principles, and departures which could in the long-term, be dangerous for the Union itself.

For many years I had been making the point of European Union and its political leaders need to put a greater effort into the manner in which they communicate with the citizens of the Union regarding policies which have been enacted and policies return intended.

Over the years I have seen, at first hand in a series of Irish referenda, the dangers which arise when the Union does not communicate with its citizens or when leaders in individual member states for domestic reasons miss-communicate the Union’s position on sensitive matters.

An unwelcome example of this is to be found in the recent efforts by the French and German leadership to force the issue of taxation back onto the agenda of the Union.

This particular matter has been discussed repeatedly over the last 20 or 25 years. It is, in my view, decidedly dangerous for political leaders in any country to unilaterally seek to put such a thorny issue on to the agenda for what are, predominantly, domestic political considerations.

That not only departs from the Community method but looks like the big member states trying to set the agenda for us all.

French policy makers have been fixated on the issue of Ireland’s 12.5% Corporation Profit Tax (CPT) for a long time. There are also signs of irritation in Berlin.
As I mentioned in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, this is a dangerous obsession that will add to Euro scepticism, that ultimately serves no purpose and that could lead to another EU treaty setback.

A bull headed effort to force another member State to reverse a position defended for decades at a time of extreme economic pressure is a strange way of demonstrating solidarity.

It seems to me disingenuous for French or other political leadership to seek to use, as is happening at the moment, the current difficulties which my country faces to force the issue of national tax sovereignty back on the agenda. The approach which we have see in recent weeks dangerously ignores the fact that taxation is a sovereign matter which the member states have not yet - nor in my belief ever should - surrender to Brussels.

It is of course a fact that we don’t all agree on everything in Europe. Indeed we should be mature enough to realise that we will never agree on everything. But we should, for commonsense reasons, focus on those issues that we can resolve rather than on those issues that we will never resolve.

Europe has plenty of problems to solve without resurrecting issues on which there is no common agreement. We live in very challenging times. Economic recovery has been slower than it should be. There are issues in all sorts of areas that require our attention. Resurrecting the ghost of debates that have been fought and lost is not a particularly constructive way forward.

A much more constructive approach is that which we find within the ELDR group. We seek to support each other, respecting that there will always be differences. The group seeks to build the European Union by focusing on those things on which we can find common agreement rather than on focusing on those issues on which common agreement have been missing for years.

Speech by Dick Roche at the Third Congress of Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), Bratislava, Slovakia, 26 March 2011

Graham Watson MEP, ELDR Vice President

Three lessons can be learned from the popular democratic uprisings which should inform our policy from now on.

The first is that it is no good preaching the values of democracy if we arm its enemies. Having armed Gadhafi and other autocrats there is a logical case to be made for arming the protesters, particularly if we fail to live up to the ‘duty to protect’ laid down in the UN Charter: but this policy should be pursued only in extremis. Most important, however, is to stop arms sales to autocratic regimes wherever they are: democracy’s appeal is not limited to north Africa, nor the temptation to beleaguered autocrats to use arms against their own people.

Second, let us act now to devise a common EU foreign policy which denies the leaders of autocratic governments and their immediate families access to our countries for private purposes: they should not be allowed to launder their wealth through our banking systems or property markets, educate their children in our schools or take private holidays in our resorts.

Neither of the above policies would cost us more than we can easily afford.

Third, we should move rapidly to recognise transitional interim governments (or whatever victorious protesters call themselves) as legitimate (though not necessary the sole legitimate) representatives of their peoples as long as they remain committed to democracy; and we should cease to recognise their oppressors. Poland’s ‘Solidarity’ was recognised long before it had any legitimate democratic foundation. We should take active steps to make contact with the leaders of the north African popular uprisings and ensure that our diplomats keep in touch with prominent dissidents in undemocratic countries wherever they serve.

These three steps would enhance respect for democracy, send a signal to those who do not respect its rules and put us on the right side of history.

Graham Watson is a Member of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and Chairman of its delegation for relations with India. He is a Vice President of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party.