Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-14-Speech-3-031"
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"en.20040114.1.3-031"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office and Mr President, I am very pleased that the Taoiseach and his ministers are here today and that they hold the presidency of Europe at this particularly crucial time. Because of the failure to establish agreement on the new European Constitution during the previous presidency, their first main task is to reach that agreement. I hope they will, because there is a clear need for a long-term constitutional framework for the new Europe of 25 countries, which may well become even larger during this decade.
The principles of the European Union have served us very well and must be preserved in the new Constitution: full representation of each Member State in all the institutions – institutions which respect our different identities, and where we can work together in our common interest.
I am confident that the Irish presidency will work hard to secure an agreement capable of winning the support of all the peoples of the European Union, in which all citizens and all Member States have equal rights, there is no second-class membership and we all make progress together. A two-speed or a two-tier Europe will not succeed in meeting the aspirations of our peoples.
Mr President-in-Office, the work you and your government have done, and are still doing, for peace in Northern Ireland is outstanding. The European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution: the first half of the last century was the worst in the history of the world – 50 million dead. Who, then, could have dreamt that, in the second half of that century, those same peoples would unite? The principles at the heart of the European Union can therefore solve conflict anywhere in the world because those three principles are also at the heart of our agreement in Northern Ireland. Accordingly, given our history of success in conflict resolution in Europe, would it not be a very good thing if, during the Irish presidency, you were to persuade the Commission to set up a special department of peace and reconciliation so that, instead of sending armies to areas of conflict, a team of people equipped with the European Union's philosophy and principles is dispatched to those areas, since today we are in a stronger position to shape the world?
Technology, telecommunications and transport have made the world a much smaller place. The European Union could therefore play a major role in ensuring there will be no conflict or war in the world. The way to do that is to transport the philosophy of the European Union to areas of conflict: dialogue developed there will enable agreement to be reached accordingly."@en1
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