Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-20-Speech-2-233"
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"en.20040420.8.2-233"2
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"Thank you very much, Mr Cox, for coming here today and for allowing me, with the kind permission of the Council presidency, to occupy the Council’s benches temporarily for a few minutes and say a few words to you.
Ladies and gentlemen, for the great democratic and civic moment of exchange and dialogue that awaits you and this House in a few weeks’ time, I sincerely wish each and every one of you good luck, whatever your opinions and convictions. Mr President, because I know this was not customary, I want to thank you for allowing me to say these few words, because it was something I very much wanted to do.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to have spoken to you a few days ago, but that was not possible because my appointment as France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs happened very quickly. I wanted to say a few words to you and I am very grateful to Mr Cox, the President, for allowing me to do so.
Commissioner Schreyer, ladies and gentlemen, Voltaire liked to say that his motto was: short letters for long friendships. The brevity of my address will likewise bear no relation to what I hope will be a long and enduring relationship. My first words have been for you, Mr President, to thank you for allowing me to say them to you; I know that you have made an exception for me. Now that another task has been entrusted to me in my country, I am pleased to be able to pay tribute to you and take my leave as is customary between partners and between friends, because I cannot forget – and have no wish to – that the battles I had for nearly five years here in Strasbourg and in Brussels in the service of the Commission were battles shared by and with this House.
First, the battle for the Constitution, which, we hope, and we are working to that end, will reach the decisive stage of adoption in June at the latest, thanks to the skill and efforts of the Irish Presidency; it is based on a project in which we can all see the work we have put in, because that project is our own. When it came to designing it, Commissioner Vitorino and I found ourselves working in the Presidium with Mr Hänsch and Mrs Méndez de Vigo. When it was fiercely debated, article by article, comma by comma, and finalised, we were again side by side with many other members of the Convention whom I see again here: Mr Brok, Mr Duff, Mr Duhamel, Mr Lamassoure, Mrs Van Lancker, Mr Voggenhuber and others I am thinking of who will not take it amiss if I do not mention them by name, Parliament’s delegates to the convention and their deputies, who were always active, uncompromising and intelligent. I have no doubt that when the time comes to defend this text and explain it to the peoples of Europe – I remember the concern that Mr Dell'Alba had and still has to explain it – we shall all be back together again as a team, whatever our positions, doing so together.
Mr President, all along this exciting and difficult road there was someone who helped me greatly with his guidance and advice, and that was Mr Napolitano, who is here today. In spite of everything, he believed above all in the possibility of that Convention and of the Constitution. I would like to thank him for his advice and to pay tribute to his work and his vision, by quoting the French writer André Maurois, who once said that ‘progress is made by doing the impossible’.
As you know, my other battle was and will continue to be economic, social and now territorial cohesion and its future after 2007. Cohesion, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the European Union’s finest policies. Together with the entire team at the Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional Policy, who were a tremendous help to me, I wanted to ensure that the regions – your regions and, first and foremost, those whose need is greatest because they are the poorest or the most remote, such as the outermost regions and others – are really partners and never spectators of European projects and European progress.
Decision time is approaching. When it adopts its position on the financial perspectives and cohesion policy in a few hours’ time, this House will be taking an important step towards that final decision in 2005. This gives me an opportunity, and I have almost finished, to thank some of you more personally – the three chairmen of the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism with whom I had the good fortune of working: Mr Hatzidakis, Mr Caveri, and today Mr Costa; the successive rapporteurs who helped me unstintingly in shaping the future of this cohesion policy: Mr Musotto, Mrs Schroedter, Mr Mastorakis and Mr Pomés Ruiz; and finally those whose similarly unstinting vigilance and advice enabled me to base that policy on sound joint budget management: Mrs Theato, Mr Wynn, Mrs Pittella and Mr Kuhne. I do not want to hurt the feelings of others I have worked with; I am thinking of them and include them in my thanks.
Mr President, this is the first time in a long time – I was once a minister – that, with your permission and that of the Irish Presidency, I have spoken to you from the Council benches.
The responsibilities that I have today are, of course, different from those of the Commission. You may be sure of one thing: neither my ideas, nor my method, nor, in particular, my availability or my friendship with this Parliament and those who sit here will be affected or changed now that I am Minister of European and Foreign Affairs of the French Republic. We met because of a particular idea of Europe and I am quite sure that in the near future we will meet again for the same reason. There are so many things on which we need to work together."@en1
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