Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-13-Speech-1-048"
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"en.20000313.2.1-048"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank Mr Gutíerrez for his speech tonight and also for his Lisbon initiative, which is very important to us. If we are honest, we must admit that it has been a very long road from Luxembourg to Lisbon, and that really now we are looking for concrete achievements, for something to genuinely come out of this Lisbon Summit.
We have a lot of Europeans in the gallery here with us this evening and I wonder what they make of our discussion here this evening. I would like them to take away with them this evening the idea that the institutions of the European Union are now embarked upon a genuine process, which will lead to full employment once again in the European Union.
There are many challenges involved with creating that full employment. Some of those challenges will be very difficult to overcome, but the important thing is that we have to turn the rhetoric of what we have been saying for many, many years – about full employment, about a socially inclusive society, about a society that is based on innovation and knowledge – into reality. This is the great challenge, the great importance of Lisbon.
I just want to dwell on one or two key aspects that will help us realise that goal of turning rhetoric into reality. Firstly, there is the commitment to having genuine benchmarks, a genuine process of peer review, to the setting of targets, of genuine targets that we can achieve, to governments agreeing to embark upon what is quite a brave process of saying: ‘yes, we will allow ourselves to be marked against each other, we will allow ourselves to be marked against the rest of the world’.
That really is a brave decision, because some Member States will clearly find themselves towards the bottom of the league table, which is something nobody likes. But this is important if we are to have a genuine achievable outcome from this Lisbon Summit rather than perhaps setting off down another road – a road which I know Prime Minister Gutíerrez does not want to embark on, because he actually wants to see something achieved in the process of the Lisbon Summit.
There are other areas that we must look at. One of these is the challenge of creating an e-Europe which involves all its citizens and does not leave anybody on the wayside. Another is the process of actually having a genuine single market – which we still do not yet have – and skills training that will be the key to delivering that innovative and knowledge-driven society.
There are tough choices, but once again in the gallery here tonight, I would like those people listening to this debate to take away with them the belief that we are going to actually have a society based on full employment, that the road to Lisbon will be the end of our journey, and that some concrete results will actually come out of it."@en1
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