Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-04-Speech-2-180"
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"en.20010904.8.2-180"2
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"Madam President, Mr President of the Commission, it is well over eighteen months, Mr Prodi, since you announced that the reform of European governance was one of the Commission's four strategic objectives. It is to your honour that, like earlier Commission presidents, you want to leave your personal mark on the Commission. Your concern to take measures which will at last close the gap between the Union and its citizens is one which I wholeheartedly support. As does the overwhelming majority of the House. We want to do something, at long last, to turn a citizens’ Europe from a slogan into a reality.
With all due respect for your concern, Mr President of the Commission, I must say to you in all honesty that I am disappointed in what now lies before us. I have handed out this White Paper and asked our citizens what they think of it. Do you know what the immediate problem was? They had no idea what the 40 odd pages were about. It is all pure Eurospeak, was the reply. How, I wonder, can we possibly close this gap if the language is incomprehensible to its target audience?
The White Paper contains positive ideas, such as strengthening the role of the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions or stepping up consultation with organisations in civil society, it is true. Nonetheless, I should like briefly to address a few crucial questions.
The basic political problem of the White Paper is obvious, I think, right from the start. It says that people think the Union is incapable of acting where action is needed, for example, on unemployment. This reading of the problem is simply not true. The citizens do not think the Union is incapable; on the contrary, their experience on a daily basis is that the Union and its Member States have proven they are incapable. Mr Prodi, you quite rightly said in your speech that, when we speak of governance, we are really talking about democracy. You quite rightly addressed the problem of the democratisation of the European Union here today, but why can I only find trace elements of it in the White Paper itself?
One last word on the question of revising the Treaty. The White Paper makes provision for a consultation stage up to March 2002. The final proposals are then due to be submitted a further six months later. Surely it is absurd to present proposals geared to the current Treaties in the autumn of this year, when we will already have been working flat out, hopefully in a convention, on revising the Treaties. Dispensing with amendments to the Treaty, as you have posited, is not, in my view, a viable proposition, quite apart from the fact that you suggest a revision in the White Paper itself.
All in all, Mr President of the Commission, even after what my fellow members have said, I see a need for extensive discussion and I offer you Parliament's and my personal assistance."@en1
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