Paris, 2005, the 10th of June

As Mr Barroso said he will answer any letter
let help him to buy some ink to answer WONUC letter !

Mr. Jose Manuel Durao Barroso
President of the European Union Commission
Brussels
Mr. President,

With a great deal of lucidity, intelligence and courage, you have succeeded in understanding that the recent results of the Dutch and French referendums on the European Constitution were, at least partially, due to a widening gap between the European institutions and the peoples of Europe.

To remedy this situation, many initiatives had been taken in order to foster a fruitful dialogue between the representatives of civil society and the European institutions, like the creation of the Economic and Social Council, or encouraged after having been regulated, like “lobbying”. Yet it is abundantly clear that these initiatives have not met your expectations: the gap between what is now perceived as a technocratic aristocracy and the people has merely widened. Why?

Your structures and your modes of functioning prevent you from truly listening to the people. “Lobbying” is reserved de facto for the entities that have sufficient financial resources to be represented in Brussels, privileging industrial firms, which is perfectly understandable. The procedures for designation to the Economic and Social Committee have been set in line with criteria that have subjected its members to technocratised intermediaries who are just as removed from their bases as the European civil servants are from the “Polish plumber” the “French vine grower” and the “Rotterdam longshoreman”.

In the specific case of energy, for reasons that the gravity of the situation forces me to abstain from any polemics, the European institutions completely ignore the employees of the nuclear industry. While we, employees of the nuclear industry, number more than 400,000 in Europe, and without nuclear energy Europe could never fulfil the commitments of the Kyoto treaty; while within less than 15 years, without nuclear energy, Europe would be faced with a dramatic energy crisis; while the spectre of a water shortage looms (dixit nuclear desalination) and our societal model based on the use of the internal combustion engine is collapsing (dixit nuclear production hydrogen), you ignore us and insist on recognising as our “spokesmen” only the representatives of the European Trade Union Confederation, in other words, antinuclear front men, embedded in the obscurantist ideas of self-proclaimed ecological organisations who dream of shutting down all the nuclear power plants of the entire world. How could you believe that these individuals could speak in our name?

Europe has devoted and continues to devote a few hundred million euros to support antinuclear organisations, their claims and their actions, which destroy the jobs and the wealth created by our labour, while the amount of the sums that you have allocated to us is exactly zero. You have always ignored us. You prefer to listen to a handful of professional agitators paid from the European budget, whose pantomimes are relayed by the sensation hungry media. In these conditions, how could you be surprised by our response, when we are finally allowed to express ourselves! When will you stop disdaining the women and the men who work hard every day, the people who have neither the time nor the means to display themselves in circus antics before the television cameras?

You must understand that the workers of the nuclear industry, whom I have the honour and privilege to represent, are ready to join you to jump-start a Europe in which we believe. But this means that you will have to listen to us, and above all, hear us.

Please consider me at your entire disposal.

Yours faithfully

Prof.Dr. André Maïsseu, President of WONUC,