Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-11-Speech-3-132"
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"en.20050511.16.3-132"2
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".
Mr President, the British poet John Donne observed: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself, but a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less’.
Europe has the potential to be a beacon of hope, a model of tolerance, diversity and stability, in a world where these attributes are still rare. We can insist on a bill of rights, or we can see our rights eroded. We can ratify the European Constitution and put our faith in democracy and accountable government, or we can continue to leave too much power in unelected hands. We can hold out the hand of friendship to the dispossessed, or cocoon ourselves in an illusory haven of prosperity. We can welcome Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and the western Balkans and accept that Europe should be plural and diverse, or continue to treat each other with hostility and suspicion. Convergence is not just an ideal, it is an economic and political necessity. It is time to move beyond national self-interest towards greater convergence. Cooperation is the way forward, enabling us to face global challenges together.
Europe has a leading role to play in the era of global governance. It is a stabilising force and a benchmark for other countries and peoples. Trade and cooperation can bring to others the fruits it has brought to us, and for that reason my Group welcomes greater contact with Russia and the People’s Republic of China. But history should teach us not to be an instrument in supporting authoritarian regimes. Liberals and Democrats view with concern the direction of some of the Council’s policies: to undercut the Americans in some downward Dutch auction of human rights standards would be an affront to the dignity for which Europe’s people have fought so hard.
Just as no man is an island, no country is an island either. We are joined together in our custody of a fragile world and our stewardship of its inhabitants. Let Europe exemplify the dignity of difference and grasp the challenge.
That was in 1624, yet for over 300 years peoples and states continued to wage war across our continent. Tribalism and hatred are Europe’s ugly legacy. If we had not learned it earlier, the ‘war to end all wars’ should have shown us the futility and the trauma of organised warfare. Our awakening from that nightmare led to the League of Nations, yet we continued to distil the fruits of scientific advance into the firewater of the weapons of mass destruction. By the time World War II ended in Europe, on 8 May 1945, more than 40 million people had lost their lives.
A cynic might say that 20th century Europeans were slow learners. It took two bloody wars and a continent in ruins to teach us that a united Europe is worth more than the sum of its parts.
Not all of us were able even then to realise our aspirations for peace and freedom. While for most Europeans May 1945 marked the liberation of their countries from Nazi tyranny and the beginning of a new path to freedom and reconstruction, for those who found themselves on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, one tyranny was quickly replaced by another. A further two generations were denied the liberty we now enjoy. As a student at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig in 1976, I saw this at first hand.
Our historical perspectives are inevitably different. But this must be a debate about the future, not the past. Let us rejoice that Europe is united in peace and that we can sit together in the same debating chamber with a set of common supranational institutions of government deciding on matters of mutual concern.
It was the imperative of
dependence that brought the European Union into being and saw the Soviet bloc finally crumble. We started with coal and steel, the building blocks of post-war Europe; we built the common market, the basis of prosperity undreamt of by my parents; we made the single currency a reality for 300 million Europeans at the dawn of this new century.
As we mark the 60th anniversary of a lasting peace, we see that Europe has come a long way, through gradual steps to build solidarity between our peoples. There is no doubt that the European Union has been a success:
have become part of our common legislative and social fabric. But there is no guarantee it will always be that way, and we stand now at a watershed, represented by the constitutional treaty. Can we move forward and consolidate this unprecedented era of peace, stability and prosperity, or will it melt before our eyes and be replaced by a new national rivalry and brinkmanship?
A
columnist reminded us last week how thin is the veneer of civilisation, how weak the voice of human conscience when tempted away from the rule of law and respect for our fellow human beings. This is the challenge before our Member States as they are called upon to ratify the Constitution.
A peaceful and prosperous Europe was always based on the premise that strength lay in convergence and shared mandates. Cooperation has grown from trade to encompass social policy, employment, immigration, justice, policing and foreign policy. The revolutions in central and eastern Europe have lifted from our shoulders the yoke of Yalta, but we are confronted with new challenges. The challenge, for example, of feeding, clothing and housing a growing world population, while more and more are pushed into migration by war or hunger or sheer desperation. The challenge of dealing with a hole in the ozone layer, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and climate change. Or the threat of internationally organised crime, where some criminal gangs are now more powerful than some national governments, bringing misery to many though the trade in drugs and small arms and the trafficking of people, and working hand-in-hand with terrorists. None of these challenges can be faced by our countries acting alone. To provide the security, prosperity and opportunity which our fellow citizens expect government to deliver, we have to work together. And work together, too, with the United States and Canada, to whose people we owe so much and whose values by and large we share, not only to confront with them common challenges but to make them feel more comfortable with a new and more powerful Europe."@en1
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"inter"1
"liberté, egalité, fraternité"1
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