Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-16-Speech-3-052"
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"en.20010516.3.3-052"2
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"Mr President, I listened with great interest to the long and sustained shipping metaphor of the Commissioner, who can now lay claim to be a master mariner of sorts. Whether it is his bulk carrier or the speedboat version that is commended by Mr Elles, I certainly think that the Commissioner's focus on deepening the relationship and on being more strategic – even if there is argument on detail – is, in broad terms very welcome.
My group subscribes to the broad detail of the resolution, so I will not rehearse the issues. I agree with the observations of colleagues about fears of a drift in certain cases towards unilateralism, some of the points about bilateral versus multilateral trade and issues about Kyoto, the Echelon Committee, the death penalty, and so on.
I want to speak a little about what our role as parliamentarians should be. We have developed both informally and formally a considerable dialogue with aspects of the legislative process in the US, but as a parliamentary process it remains sub-optimal. We need to do a lot more work on that. Our unique contribution as parliamentarians to the quality of this dialogue will be in establishing a better quality of relationship, in particular with our counterparts in the US Congress. It seems to me that our mission in this regard is, both in Washington DC and in Strasbourg and Brussels, to create the playing field in which the Lamys and Zellecks – or others, depending on whether we are dealing with security and defence, or whatever – can actually play. Because it is clear, certainly in the case of Congress, that they are a major influence on the role of the US executive, and we here are a growing influence on the executive, although we still regret the pillar system that marginalises us in areas of foreign policy or in fighting crime, and so on.
But there is a role here, and we need to do more work on that as a unique parliamentary contribution to the playing field in which executives can deliver the goods. In that sense, I would like to pledge my group and my time to working on that.
The second point I would like to mention concerns globalisation: we have noted the sclerotic effect of either Congress or ourselves legislating first and discovering that the ends do not match. We need in the global context to insist on appropriate regulation, but to try to discover as parliamentarians what it is. Is it soft law or hard law? Self-regulation or co-regulation? We need now to look for some degree of legislative creativity, so that there is no sclerotic dysfunction: wanting to do the right thing, but by chance arriving at another dispute.
Finally, we should put disputes in perspective, as the Commissioner has sought to do. Even bananas, Boeing, beef, etc. represent no more than 2% of the flow of transatlantic trade. Of course, they have a high priority, but they are not the whole story and we must focus on the whole story."@en1
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