Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-264"
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"en.20040309.10.2-264"2
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"Ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, I would like to thank the three rapporteurs most warmly for having done a good job so quickly. I see it as giving cultural, educational and youth organisations the important message that this House has powerful advocates to plead their causes. If I may now speak on the area in which I have been heavily involved, with the White Paper on Youth, the new youth programme and the old one, I have to say that, as a result of their increasing contacts through the recent consultation processes, youth organisations and the European Youth Forum have had their expectations raised very high. I believe that young people are very satisfied with the good legal basis for financially supporting over 80 youth organisations.
Compared with other policy areas – cultural policy, say, or education – the youth programme is so poorly endowed that we end up allocating less than one per cent of the overall EU Budget to this area, and that, in the long term, ladies and gentlemen, is no longer acceptable. The public want to see the European Union reflecting their own interests. This is an area into which we must breathe life.
For this reason, the geographical dimension, which we must always have at the back of our minds when supporting youth organisations, is about more than the enlarged EU. It has to be clear to us that the European Youth Forum, as an umbrella organisation for youth, also works with the countries belonging to the Council of Europe, where it performs an important role as a political intermediary. Youth associations, let me say, are always a bit ahead of the other organisations. Young people think further ahead; they perhaps have a clearer view of their own future than do people like us who are immersed in day-today living and in the business of politics.
This explains the cooperation with the CIS, and the programme’s importance in terms of peaceful political development in the Mediterranean is not to be underestimated either. With regard to the elections on 10-13 June, too, I can only say that we have to persuade young people that Europe is the right place in which to take their political ideas further. Today, then, is a good day for us to adopt these three programmes, after which we can have a bit more clout in the Budget negotiations and, where forthcoming youth programmes are concerned, look further into the future."@en1
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