A report on 267 proposed changes in EU treaties will be debated by the European Parliament on October 12. It has been heavily criticized by the European Conservatives and Reformists representative, MEP Jacek Saryusz Wolski, who refused to back it because it entails “a mass transfer of powers from the member states to the EU.”
The most radical changes involve removing the power of the member states’ veto and handing to EU institutions powers in a score of policy areas.
Speaking at a Warsaw conference on the implications of the changes, the head of NBP, Adam Glapiński, said that “these treaty changes have major economic implications that will be most keenly felt by ordinary people.”
Glapiński believes that a European federal state is being created, which will be dominated by Germany.
“The shell will remain the same, but sovereignty will be gone,” he said.
Glapiński added that this was not the EU that Poland had joined almost 20 years ago after a referendum vote.
“Poles voted to be part of the West, for security, democracy, prosperity and the free market, but what we are getting now is a European federal state with Germany in control,” he said.
The NBP chief also said that although the euro currency was a French project, it has actually served Germany and other wealthy EU states rather than France.
“The euro has led to the poorer states in southern Europe to lose out,” underlined the head of the NBP.
Adam Glapiński also pointed to the lack of democratic mandate for the radical changes that were now being proposed. The voters had not been consulted in referenda or in domestic or European elections on these proposals, he argued.
He added that the proposed treaty changes were being proposed in an “undemocratic manner, which breached all the principles of democracy and has serious economic implications,” such as the proposal for the euro to be the only currency in the EU. This meant that the treaty “would mean the liquidation of the Polish zloty, the end of our national currency, the end of our independence and the end of our own monetary policy,” he said.
