Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-12-Speech-3-051"
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"en.20000412.2.3-051"2
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"Mr President, dismayed as I am at the ongoing prejudice shown towards Austria by 14 Member States, I would like to confine my comments on the matter at hand to the issue of closer cooperation, in all its guises. There has been a marked change in attitudes towards closer cooperation since the adoption of the Treaty of Amsterdam.
I can still clearly remember how long we used to spend discussing this, in what was still the institutional committee at the time. The upshot was that Mr Méndez de Vigo and Mr Tsatsos – whom I greatly esteem – produced a report highlighting the risks associated with Member States developing at different rates, and welcoming the fact that the Treaty would be framed in such a way as to keep these risks down to a manageable level. The present view taken by Mr Dimitrakopoulos and Mr Leinen is that closer cooperation must serve to stimulate the development of the Union, and they even recommend that it should have its own chapter in the EU Treaty. This is an astonishing turn of events, when one considers that this idea was once deemed the ultimate threat to the integration process. A multi-speed Europe has become the order of the day. We are now looking, by way of an attempt to deal with enlargement, to the possibility of a third of Member States forming a “vanguard”. All this means is that those Member States not wishing to join the frontrunners will be left with a choice between complete non-participation or joining a system that was originally thought to be without merit at a later stage. Multi-speed integration of this kind cannot act as a guarantee for coherent and stable development of the Union.
On the contrary, I am convinced that this plan is far more likely to jeopardise the Union’s goals than to help improve its decision-making structures. In any case, that was the view taken by the architects of the EU as recently as 1996."@en1
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