"The Convention tackles the issues head on. The Heads of State or Government will not be in a position to simply discard its conclusions. They start realising this. It is no accident that the new German Government has designated Joschka Fischer to sit in the Convention.

The main items of discussion which will be on the agenda during the coming months are clear: economic and social governance of the Union, the role of national parliaments and the control of subsidiarity, external action of the European Union and the institutional architecture.
[...]

Let me fist make it absolutely clear that the European Union is a Community, that is a supranational institution. That is precisely what makes it so unique. The danger that it degenerates into a merely intergovernmental organisation is, however, not imaginary.

I sense this danger also in the preliminary Draft Constitutional Treaty. It transpires too much the philosophy of such an intergovernmental cooperation between Member States which sovereignly decide to conduct a common policy in certain areas. Our model is Community cooperation, which has as its starting point the Community method and shifts to the intergovernmental approach only when it appears that in some matters a common policy is not yet possible.

I am a passionate advocate of the Community method. It is this method, which constitutes the essential feature of our Union. It implies that we abandon the paralysing consensus rule and that we develop genuine Community institutions. "

[Speech of Guy Verhofstadt in the European College in Brugge, 18. November.]