Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-13-Speech-1-022"
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"Madam President, I would first of all like to extend my warmest congratulations to Prime Minister Guterres for his initiative for the Lisbon Summit, and congratulate him on the quality of the preparatory work. We fully approve of the breakdown he presented to us, which received such an ovation, and we support his initiative. Together, we can make the Lisbon Summit a success.
I will restrict myself in this speech to presenting the Commission’s contribution to Lisbon – our long-term strategy and our vision for this Summit. In Lisbon, very simply, we will have to decide whether Europe will be able to regain its leading role in the economic and technological worlds, relinquished long ago. This will depend on us, on whether we are able to boost the economic growth of the European system sufficiently, on the extent to which we are able to generate employment, on the level of education of our citizens and on the training we give our workers. These are familiar topics, as Prime Minister Guterres has said, but this summit is not going to be another Luxembourg, Cardiff or Cologne: we want to take a completely new approach to these issues, which we have already tackled in the past, and, rather than taking each one in isolation, deal with them collectively and, at last, create an intervention system. Now is the time to do this because there is currently a good chance of succeeding. In fact, this is a unique opportunity, and it is the result of the recent, successful implementation of a wise policy: inflation is low, the balance of payments is in a generally healthy state, public finances are in order and there is, at last, a unanimous forecast of strong economic growth, although, as the Portuguese Prime Minister stressed, this does not mean that economic growth is guaranteed. Never has this generation witnessed such a consensus of all the economic experts in Europe in forecasting strong and sustained growth. Even the rise in oil prices did not cause an increase in inflation or halt this economic expansion, as might have been expected. There are, nevertheless, a number of warning signs, but these are not of a nature to stop us proceeding with a development policy as we had intended and planned to do.
The challenges awaiting us in Lisbon are therefore very simple: we must meet the challenge of technology by regaining lost ground in the areas of knowledge and technical skills, especially retraining technologies. This will put us back in the lead, and this is why we adopted the e-Europe initiative, which prompted the Commission to set a practical example in its administrative reform. We committed ourselves, and I confirm this commitment before this House, to creating a Commission, or perhaps I should say an
in which all correspondence regarding supplies, research etc. relating to this institution will no longer be dealt with on paper but will all be carried out directly by e-mail. This is an extremely complicated undertaking, but we will succeed because our mission is very clear, we are a relatively small institution and we have a very high level of culture. By doing so, we want to set a clear example to all the European governments and all the administrations with which we will have to communicate by e-mail instead of on paper.
In addition to this, we are facing a social challenge: the need to fight unemployment and social exclusion. President Guterres’ address revealed a systemic approach based both on introducing modern technology and also ensuring that this does not lead to new forms of social exclusion. This was the serious risk of the development which took place during the eighties and also of more recent development. I have to say that I am extremely concerned by the fact that the income discrepancies in European society are constantly widening instead of diminishing: this aspect of the social divide is of fundamental importance and must be taken into due consideration if we want to avoid the complete disintegration of society in the near future. Our summit will therefore be on sustainable development and employment. As we have already done, not without some opposition from certain quarters, we can and must set full employment as a possible goal. We have been through a tough period, but I can assure you that there is nothing unrealistic in this goal. It is well within our reach because we have a solid macroeconomic basis, to which we must now add the Lisbon Summit, in terms of human resources and new ideas regarding the market and the harnessing of technical skills and research. Human resources mean education, training and reform of the Welfare State in order to deal, in particular, with the problem of an ageing society. We have not always managed to find an adequate solution to this problem, which is affecting all our countries and becoming more serious every day. And it is not going to go away. I am confident that in Lisbon we will be able to take a step forwards, pooling benchmarking experiments and proposals on this major issue.
It is not true that we have achieved a perfect single market: there is still a great deal to do in this area. We need further structural reform; in particular, we need to resolve the situation in the services, electronic commerce, transport and energy sections, for there are still a large number of public services which are underperforming in terms of competitiveness and efficiency. If we want to halt inflation by raising oil prices, we must take action at both European and national levels to improve these services, and the same applies to financial and banking services. We therefore need – and I am saying this because the slump has lasted quite a while now – a European company statute, a Community patent, a more liquid capital market and better procurement rules. These are operational points which cannot be dismissed. We at the Commission will do our part and, I repeat, we will introduce all these new technologies within the institution in all our procedures and relations with the outside world. However, since it is our desire to be a model of efficient administration, we must endeavour to operate in such a way that this takes place all over the continent and we are able to be instrumental in expanding technical skills and technology. We must mobilise individual citizens, local authorities, national governments, businesses and trade unions. As President Guterres said, the main goal of Lisbon will be to set up this network. To achieve results, we need a new method, and, as the Portuguese Prime Minister said in his speech, clear macroeconomic parameters for this activity. We are not introducing a new process: we are not adding anything new, but for the first time we are combining the existing processes and there is a chance this may bring success. However, we do have to introduce something different: we have to find a way of assessing our progress and providing public opinion with tangible facts, and we therefore have to use a benchmarking system. By the term benchmarking, which was relatively unknown up until a few years ago, I mean a completely institutional means of comparing and assessing our progress. We must be constantly, fully aware of the areas in which we have lost ground, and there are many of them. One example is biotechnology, in which we have been relatively unsuccessful in recent years. We must disseminate best practice in all fields and endeavour to advance it at European level.
In Lisbon, we will find the fruit of our preparations, on which we have worked together, with the cooperation, for which I am extremely grateful, of the Portuguese Presidency. We will find specific, operational undertakings, clear objectives and a limited number of tangible, but assessable measures which will enable us to speed up change and make progress, because leadership in the next century is being decided now. We will achieve a great, strong, common Europe only if we are able, once again, to offer our citizens the joy of regaining our lost primacy."@en1
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