Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-27-Speech-3-037"
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"en.20041027.3.3-037"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Nicolaï, Commissioner, in the 1980s, Jacques Delors gave the European project a new impetus and a new vision, when he proposed the internal market and the single currency. In 2000, at the Lisbon Summit, the EU once again set itself a challenge for a decade: to become the most dynamic and most competitive economy in the world. 2005 is almost upon us, already the midway point in the decade, and the balance sheet does not make very cheerful reading. Scant progress has been made and in a matter of days Mr Kok will present his interim evaluation report, which will be the main item on the agenda at the November European Summit.
We are not yet able to comment on the conclusions of the interim report in this House, but I do wish to raise two points that I feel are extremely relevant. The first relates to the fact that when the intention of a strategy is to influence everything, it normally influences nothing. We must therefore set clear priorities within a clear strategy. There is no point in favouring the economic strand of the strategy to the detriment of the social or environmental strand, or vice-versa. What we must do is set out political priorities for all of the strands. These are difficult choices, but they cannot be put off any longer.
The second point is that I wish to emphasise that the Lisbon Strategy cannot only be seen as a responsibility of the EU. Success will depend, to a large extent, on the Member States’ ability to put the structural reforms into practice, which means that they will have to play a leading role at world level. I still believe that the aims of the Lisbon Strategy are neither utopian nor impossible to achieve. Back in the 1980s, for example, who would have believed that more than 300 million Europeans would be using the single currency today? As Kohl once said, the visionaries end up being the realists.
One last word, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, to welcome the position taken by the President – or so I hope – of the next European Commission, in making the Lisbon Strategy a priority for his term in office."@en1
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