Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-048"
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Madam President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, the December 2000 European Council will be remembered as particularly lengthy and particularly complex. This was always likely, given its agenda and indeed that is precisely what happened.
Moving on to the Intergovernmental Conference and the Treaty of Nice, I would first of all like to pay heartfelt tribute to Michel Barnier for his work.
He worked, as I did but to a greater extent, in collaboration with Parliament, particularly with Giorgio Napolitano and his Committee, with the two rapporteurs, Mr Leinen and Mr Dimitrakopoulos and, of course, with Mr Brok and Mr Tsatsos, whose commitment was total and absolute. Finally, Madam President, I would like to praise the truly exemplary clarity of your own speeches to the meetings of the Council.
As you will remember, Madam President, the last time that I addressed this House, just before the Summit, I said that we needed a treaty with genuine added value. In particular, I promised to return to this House with a frank assessment of the outcome. Moreover, in your own address at the beginning of the Summit, you said that Parliament would judge the success of Nice in terms of quality as well as quantity.
It will be a little while before we can make a full, accurate assessment of the progress made at Nice, but we can at this stage hazard a few observations. The first relates to the extension of qualified majority voting. This is a quantitatively important step forwards because it has brought 30 or so new chapters under this umbrella. As a result, qualified majority voting will increasingly become the general rule at the Council, and this must not be underestimated. Qualitatively, the same cannot be said. Little or no progress was made on the sensitive issues of cohesion, tax regulation and social legislation.
In fact, in these areas, the Conference came up against the intransigence of some Member States. This is something which deeply disappoints me, not just because of the short-term consequences but because the attitude behind it shows a lack of openness and understanding. Anyone who sees Europe merely as a "clearing house"
to approach when necessary and to stay away from when they cannot get what they want or once they have got everything they want from it is not just making an error of historical analysis but is cheating future generations, who have the right to expect much more from Europe.
Positive decisions were taken at Nice, some of them long-awaited. The Charter of Fundamental Rights was solemnly proclaimed. I personally have no doubt that this is a seminal text and I would like to remind those who feel that it does not go far enough – and I know that many in this House are of this opinion – that it was drafted and conceived with care precisely with a view to giving it legal status.
This inward-looking backdrop of reciprocal failure to make concessions does offer some small progress on justice and home affairs, however, although it has to be said that most of this progress has been deferred until after 2004. This is not to belittle it. It does, however, mean that the speed of development of the major new policy area of legal matters and cross-border crime, which was adopted in Tampere, is now under threat, and that the Tampere "scoreboard" will start to show delays. I hope that these delays will not be blamed on Parliament or the Commission.
Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank President Chirac and the French Prime Minister, Mr Jospin, for making it possible to put paid to the main ambiguities of our commercial policy. A good balance was struck between the legitimate concerns surrounding issues such as cultural diversity, in particular, and the effectiveness of our powers of negotiating with our trading partners.
Another source of satisfaction lies in the result in the field of closer cooperation. Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that what we have here is a tool that is vital for the enlarged Union, one that the Commission will make use of while taking care to play its "guarantor" role fully, firstly to make it possible for countries that wish to work together more closely towards major new common goals to do so, and secondly to counter any risk of fragmentation that unregulated use of such cooperation might bring.
On the subject of the institutions themselves I would like to say three things. Where the Commission is concerned, there has been sweeping, far-reaching change. The Commission will be able to grow to 26 members. After that, the necessary and much hoped-for alterations will be made. These changes have been accompanied by the launching of major reform of the way in which the Commission is organised. The President will be appointed by majority rather than unanimous vote. After the vote of the Commission, the President will have the power to dismiss Commissioners and a wide degree of discretion regarding the actual organisation of the Commission itself, for example in matters such as the assigning of portfolios and the appointment of Vice-Presidents.
Parliament's main gain is a statute for political parties at European level. The Commission defended – unfortunately with no success although the matter has not yet been closed – our shared concerns regarding the protection of the Union's financial interests by proposing that a Prosecutor should be established. However, it is worrying that MEP numbers are being used essentially to counterbalance the equilibria in the Council. Much greater attention will need to be devoted in the future to this and other related problems, and we must move from a defensive role to a more strongly proactive one.
Lastly, it was the weighting of votes in the Council that gave rise to the most difficult debate and the most difficult decision. This was inevitable given the approach taken, but the outcome was regrettable for two reasons: firstly because it made a qualified majority more difficult and a blocking minority accordingly easier, whereas logically, in an expanding Union, the exact opposite is required;
and secondly because it has made the decision-making process even more complex, which runs counter to the legibility and transparency for which the citizens are calling.
To respond to our citizens' demands, we had advocated a double majority as the only solution which is objective, comprehensible and widely supported by smaller and larger countries alike.
At this juncture, we must pay particular tribute to the Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadt, who fought to the very end for a more equitable presence for the candidate countries and to set the qualified majority threshold at a less unreasonable level – although one that is still too high. He thus confirmed Belgium's great historic role in the European Union.
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we must recognise that the hard-won conclusion of the Nice Summit was an achievement in itself. A conclusion had to be reached and, thanks to the efforts of the Presidency, we got there in the end. There are no leftovers from Nice. The next step is to work realistically towards ratifying the Treaty as soon as possible. This will enable us to move on to welcoming the new Members, in line with the Helsinki conclusions. We must proceed resolutely in that direction.
Ladies and gentlemen, I feel – as President Chirac remarked – that the Nice Summit was characterised by the efforts of many to defend their own immediate interests, to the detriment of a long-term vision. Nice does, however, include a declaration on the future of the Union which gives me cause for some optimism. The Commission is aware of the importance of establishing a more precise division of competences between the European Union and the Member States. Incorporating the Charter of Fundamental Rights into the Treaties, simplifying the layout of the Treaties and reviewing the role of our institutions. This review must be an open, thorough discussion on a vast scale, involving the governments, parliaments and citizens of the current Member States and the candidate countries and demonstrating the dynamism of a Europe which is still being built. There is a great need for such a discussion for the experience of Nice shows that the current method of reviewing the Treaties is no longer a valid one.
Like the Community structure itself, the process being used to produce institutional change is under stress and needs to be changed. The Commission will come up with proposals for improving this process, and I am counting upon your participation and support.
Madam President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, after these initial, incomplete remarks which I have tried to put to you objectively and with conviction, I would appeal to everyone to remember that the final objective of the Nice Summit was, and still is, the unification of Europe. The new Millennium has given us an unprecedented opportunity to bind together the countries of our continent in a wide area of peace, stability and economic growth. Nice is a step in this direction: a shorter step than we had hoped for, or indeed, could have made, but a step in the right direction all the same. I therefore ask you to lend us your support.
Parliament and the Commission have already made it clear that, for their part, they intend to apply the Charter in full. Ladies and gentlemen, the original foundations of a European Company Statute were laid over 30 years ago. It is a legal instrument of obvious value which our operators had long been pressing for and which was sorely lacking during the major company restructuring we have experienced recently. I am happy to say that now there is no longer anything to prevent us from implementing it rapidly.
With regard to enlargement, the strategy proposed by the Commission was endorsed. The Social Agenda was also adopted, the fruit of productive cooperation with the Presidency, as has been pointed out.
The Commission's proposals on maritime safety and the creation of a European Food Safety Authority met with strong support, as did the decisions on our seven outermost regions.
These are some of the issues which were put before the Heads of State and Government. I would mention one other issue which I can sense will be of considerable importance: the Council also discussed the way in which the summits are organised. These events involve a huge amount of work, they are complex and they are held in a different place each time. The European Council took the wise decision to move gradually towards holding them all in Brussels. This will further reinforce the city's status as the capital of Europe
and, once the summits which have already been scheduled have taken place, one out of every two summits will be held in Brussels. Once the European Union has grown to 18 Member States, the decision will apply to all the summits. I sincerely believe that we should welcome this convincing initiative from Mr Chirac."@en1
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