Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-12-Speech-3-148"
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"en.20000412.4.3-148"2
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"Madam President, enlargement is important for the people of Europe. We must therefore find a way of cooperating throughout Europe. The accession negotiations are now under way. It is therefore important that it should be possible to conclude the Intergovernmental Conference before the end of the year. Both large and small States must be able to exercise influence in the future EU. We must strike a balance. This is necessary if our citizens are to have confidence in European cooperation.
If the composition of the European Parliament is to be adjusted, I therefore advocate a proportional, degressive reduction in the number of Members. All present Member States must be included and make their contribution. At the same time, the smallest States must be guaranteed a certain number of Members within the framework of the seven hundred seats we have set as a ceiling.
When it comes to votes in the Council, we must find a method of distributing votes which does not need to be renegotiated at each subsequent enlargement. I therefore recommend a system which takes account of differences in the size of the population.
It is important that each country should have a Member in the Commission. The Commissioners work for the whole of the Union and are, in fact, important if consensus is to be achieved between the Member States. The Commission must therefore be able to draw upon knowledge and experience from all the Member States.
EU cooperation is, in the first place, a civil European project and ought to be distinguished from anything of a military nature. The Member States do have different backgrounds where military alliances and neutrality are concerned. In Cologne and Helsinki, great progress was made in terms of preparing ourselves for preventative crisis and conflict management. It is therefore important that the Treaty should reflect the difference between civil and military cooperation. A European military alliance should not, therefore, be created within the framework of the EU’s institutions but between individual States. Military support of a kind which places States under an obligation to each other has no place in the EU’s Treaties."@en1
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