Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-03-Speech-2-144"
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"en.20001003.4.2-144"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, social policy is a cornerstone of the social model within Europe. It is also a productive factor which contributes to economic development, and although the candidate countries have made huge efforts in this respect, a great deal of effort is still required in order to reduce the developmental chasm between the European Union and the candidate countries to acceptable proportions. To give you a few examples: their wages are four times lower than ours, their purchasing power is two and a half times less than ours; and only Prague and Bratislava equal the EU’s average standard of living.
Compared with the European Union, participation in the labour market in Central and Eastern European countries is approximately five percent lower, and about twenty percent lower in the case of women. Child mortality in Eastern Europe is double that in Western Europe. In Romania, child mortality is, in fact, four times higher than that in the European Union. Technologically too, there are still discrepancies between East and West: there are four internet connections per one thousand inhabitants over there, as opposed to sixteen over here.
If the idea of swift accession is mooted – and the date of 2003 has been mentioned, even if the Commissioner does not want to commit to that date as yet, but that does stop some Western European governments from putting that date forward – this will presumably involve transitional measures or periods, and that is still a grey area. What procedure, for example, will be used to decide on these transitional periods? If the
has not been completely transposed, or cannot be fully transposed, or if it has not been implemented in practice, on what basis will a decision then be taken as to what part of the
must be implemented at all events, and what part, further to research and interpretation, could be subject to a transitional period, if necessary? We would welcome some clarification in this area. We should not be blinded by the percentage figures of community law transposed into national legislation.
One example is the social dialogue. Social dialogue is not so much a matter of establishing and recognising social partners, but mainly a problem of culture, of familiarity with employers’ delegates and employees’ representatives, of experience with providing information, consulting, debating and negotiating. What I am trying to say is that despite the transposition of a number of directives, these are not always carried out in reality.
Finally, enlargement is not just a game of words, because we cannot improve the human rights situation in Tibet just by translating the human rights declaration into Tibetan."@en1
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