Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-04-Speech-3-270"
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"en.20020904.8.3-270"2
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"Mr President, I think the last speaker, Mr Santini, made an error which a lot of people make, confusing nationality and citizenship. Even the notion of citizenship is distinct from being a citizen. It is my view that citizenship derives in the first instance from a sense of responsibility which comes from within a moral framework – I am not talking specifically about a religious framework, but a moral framework of how one sees the world and one's place in the world.
I regard myself as a citizen of the world. I do not have a piece of paper which tells me so, but there are various conventions and laws and international rights which exist and which protect me as a citizen of the world.
It seems to me that there is a lot of work to be done in terms of developing the notion of European citizenship and it is a mistake to reduce it to the notion of political citizenship, although that is an important aspect of it. Turnout in elections is important, but people's identity as citizens is not confined to their political identity. In fact many people, as we can see from the low turnouts, no longer define themselves in political terms and therefore disengage from the political process. Many are far more interested in their identity as, for instance, fans of a football club or a particular pop star.
There are a lot of good ideas in this report. One of the most interesting is the simple idea of a national holiday on Europe Day. This would create a connection between Europe and the people of Europe. It would bring home very strongly the idea that there is a benefit to being a European and being part of the European process.
As an exercise, I logged onto one of the more popular websites a few minutes before I came down here and I found 1.8 million references to citizenship. At the top of the list were the United States, Canada and then the UK. On the first thirty pages, I was not able to find a single site for the European Union. It seems to me that is a mistake. One of the things that the sites constantly emphasise is education – the education of young people. I would ask people to bear in mind that citizenship is not defined by the passport you hold."@en1
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