Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-24-Speech-2-173"
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"en.20001024.6.2-173"2
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"Our objective is indeed to safeguard what lies at the heart of Community policy, i.e. the internal market and the cohesion policies, reinforced cooperation. Matters are, therefore, perfectly clear. We wish to adhere to the
but at the same time we should not have regulations that are too inflexible. It is true that qualified majority voting is the main thing, but we must have some flexibility.
We shall have to take note of the reactions of the candidate countries. Firstly, I think it important that procedures should work properly with 15 Members, which is already a complicated matter. It would be a far more complex matter if there were 27 Members, but, as you know, the French Presidency is going to convene the European Conference on two occasions. There will be a ministerial meeting, firstly, in Sochaux, on 23 November, and there specifically we shall have a debate on institutional reform in the context of an enlarged Europe, and on the second occasion, on the morning of the 7 December at the European Council in Nice. The French Presidency is probably rather keener than others to get these countries involved.
Having said that, to make matters clear, reinforced cooperation does not mean a two-speed Europe. We have specifically stressed that an open and inclusive approach was needed, and no one should be afraid of reinforced cooperation. The ‘small countries’, for example, to use a quite inappropriate term, should not feel themselves excluded from reinforced cooperation or that reinforced cooperation means some sort of exclusive vanguard, centre of gravity or pioneer group. All it means is that there is a certain flexibility to enable specific policies to go ahead, even if some countries cannot, or do not wish to, participate, and what is true for the European Union’s Member States is also true for the candidate countries. No one must feel as if they are in a carriage being towed along by a kind of runaway train. This is not some sort of Directory."@en1
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