Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-22-Speech-3-059"
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"en.20050622.13.3-059"2
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"Madam President, Mr Juncker expressed his regret at having to give up being President-in-Office of the Council after only six months. If the Constitution were in force, he would be able to be elected for two and a half years. Perhaps the summit has shown how important it is that the Council should develop in that direction.
I am very pleased that the summit decided, not on a Plan B, which would involve halting the ratification process and re-negotiating the text, but on a Plan D, which involves proceeding with ratification while continuing with a debate – the great debate about Europe. You, Vice-President Wallström, now have in your hand the key that will unlock communication with the public in relation to the European project.
This is the right strategy, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. I hope that the referendum in Luxembourg will be a success, for we will then have two popular ‘yes’ votes against two ‘no’ votes, which might give the go-ahead for agreement to the Constitution. We now need to debate what the EU is for and why we need it. The topics for debate are obvious, including as they do the role of the EU in globalisation, the exit routes from the economic and employment crisis, the EU’s frontiers and the question of how much wider we may set them, not to mention transparency and democracy within the EU.
What I saw as missing from the summit resolution was any concept of how the debate should be structured. It is not enough to have 25 national debates in isolation from each other. We have to bring them together and create a synthesis right across the EU. If Giscard d’Estaing’s idea of a Congress of Peoples had not been blown out of the water after being proposed to the Convention, I would almost regard it as a good idea to hold an ad hoc assembly of the European Parliament and the national parliaments on that sort of platform. I hope in any case, though, that what comes out of this crisis will be a stronger Europe and a Europe closer to its people."@en1
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