Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-01-15-Speech-2-029"
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"en.20020115.1.2-029"2
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"We are building something by way of common values and future economic and social prosperity and we are doing work of historic dimensions.
The Convention which starts in March and on which we now need to work is another opportunity to define institutions and treaties fit for our common European future and for the challenges ahead. The Barcelona Process of which we will speak tomorrow and in the weeks and months to come will be a message that we too must connect with and bring reform, bring employment and bring social capacity and economic capacity to the Europe in which we believe. The common theme to which I would like to dedicate this presidency is a political commitment – through policy leadership, through stressing our public purpose, through insisting on the added value we bring on a continental scale – that we are building the democratic part of Europe's future and that we are the check and the balance and the counterweight and the source of accountability for the European technocracy. We are therefore in our public purpose an indispensable tool to an enriched European future.
It is common, I understand, after an election for the President to claim the privilege to speak to the House on the morning after the vote, when he or she might be better prepared after the rigours of the vote to express a general view. I have chosen this moment to say a few words. I should like to claim the privilege to speak on our strategic purpose another day, but I would suggest not tomorrow, because tomorrow we will hear the public purpose of the Spanish Presidency. If we wish to become a communicating Parliament, we must find our space, we must find our time, we must get our message across, have our story, tell our story, sell our story. I want, with all of you, if you will do it with me, to ask you to reflect on this.
I have sat in the pit of this Chamber since we came here two years ago and before that, from 1989, across on the other side of the canal. Right behind the President, you see the image of Europe with the twelve stars. We are politicians so, of course, we must be pragmatic and keep our feet on the ground; but nothing says that we cannot look to those stars and dream our dreams about what future we wish to create. I invite you for the next two and a half years, through a stakeholder presidency open to those who will contribute and who are willing to develop what we are as a Parliament, to engage with me in an act of European imagination, sometimes to elevate our gaze above introspection and look to the stars for some kind of European imagination and dream. Because when we imagine today, we build the capacity for tomorrow.
My friends, thank you for this extraordinary privilege. I am excited by it and I am humbled by it. So far as I can give any impulse to motivate or mobilise majorities in this House, I will dedicate my entire energy to doing so. I want to work with you on committees; I want to work with you in the Conference of Presidents and in the Bureau to achieve together our full potential.
Thank you for bestowing on me today the honour to do so."@en1
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