Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-07-03-Speech-1-065"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20000703.6.1-065"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Madam President, Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to begin with a point which Mr Patten emphasised, I thought, very well: the Indian question. I would like to offer the Portuguese Presidency my sincere congratulations on having successfully managed this initiative, which is very important, in my opinion, even if the press itself has not yet realised this. It is important because, as Mr Patten said, India is a democracy, the largest in the world, and it is a country located at the heart of Asia, at the very heart of an Asia which, at the start of this new millennium, I think represents the greatest danger of the next century, much more so than the issues we have been discussing already today, like Austria, for instance.
We must tackle the issue of China. China is as close to us now as were the totalitarian regimes before the Second World War. Yet we pretend not to notice, we continue to deal with China on a priority basis. We should be putting all the weight we possibly can behind India and attempting to make China see that Chinese citizens truly deserve to have democracy.
I think the shift to an intergovernmental form of administration is evident, Mr Guterres, and that it is not solely dependent on the personality of the Commission President, Mr Prodi. I believe that Parliament too must take considerable responsibility for having undermined this body that is central to European construction, but I think that the Council is continuing to exacerbate the sideways shift and that we must, as a matter of urgency, change course and put the Commission back at the centre of the Community’s construction.
I feel that in terms of foreign policy – you also spoke of defence policy – we are making no progress towards Community construction. Absolutely everything is based on an intergovernmental approach. We have not managed to grasp just what is our scope for input to the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. We cannot ask Mr Solana questions. We do not know what matters he is dealing with. As the European Parliament, we do not have any scope to intervene. We do not know what tasks you, the Council, have given him.
In my opinion, the fact that relations are not more acrimonious than they are and that there is still a degree of politeness and some superficial agreement is due only to the two personalities holding the key foreign policy positions, Commissioner Patten and Mr Solana. I think that if anyone else were involved, the balance between the institutions would already have been upset. I believe that in the course of this intergovernmental conference we cannot avoid starting to plan and set ourselves an agenda for the reform of the European Union providing for gradual communitisation of the common foreign and security policy. It is just not possible for us to go on exacerbating the sideways shift in the wrong direction.
We cannot envisage any sort of foreign policy which is not, in the medium term, managed directly by the Commission, or by a Commission Vice-President. Similarly, I think it would be dangerous to disregard the question of how each country is represented within the Commission, even if a good number of my fellow Members are experiencing some amnesia on the subject in plenary. I think it would be premature, and I think that Portugal cannot be unaware of this issue, to reduce the number of Commissioners to less than the number of Member States. I think the only condition which could possibly allow us to make this leap forward and rid the Commission of its ‘national’ status, involves electing the President of the Commission by universal suffrage.
I think that the countries which are not large – to avoid describing them as something else – should weigh up this proposal carefully. I hope that Portugal is concerned about it – but I know that other Member States, Belgium, Luxembourg and others too, are talking about it – as I think it is an urgent matter and that it would be much more important to start to tackle the question of the ‘check and balance’ system operating between our institutions than to engage in sideways shifts that are liable to freeze any further progress and put it on hold by discussing constitutions or Charters of Fundamental Rights, without even having any legal basis for this charter."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples