Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-22-Speech-3-185"
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"en.20050622.20.3-185"2
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".
Mr President, among the aspects of European cooperation that was left unfinished is European integration and Monetary Union. When it was set up in Maastricht, there were still inspired and visionary Europeans on the scene. Jacques Delors was one of them. His objective with regard to monetary union was twofold: to stabilise exchange rates and the development of inflation, and to bring closer a political Union in which Europe’s citizens would be guaranteed prosperity and welfare. We managed to achieve the first part of the objective beautifully. We have a stable euro that has withstood major currency crises and inflation that is so low that it has now again given economists something to worry about. As far as the second aspect, political Union, is concerned, though, we seem to be further removed from it than ever these days, although crises sometimes give rise to surprising leaps forward.
The Member States that exchanged their national currencies for the common euro without committing to a further political Union and starting one macro-economic and budget policy needed guarantees to prevent one Member State’s frugality from being undermined by another’s irresponsible overspending. They did not want to encroach too much on each other’s territory in terms of political choices for budgetary policy, and that is how the Stability and Growth Pact with its system of sanctions, came about; it was, in other words, a pact based on distrust. The pact prescribed quantitative standards for, among others, the net result of annual government budgets and for the level of public debt. That worked at the end of the last century, but the economic situation of the past few years has made these rules appear too rigid. So, on a purely rational basis, it was logical and sensible to change them and to give due priority, once again, to this objective of stability and growth.
At the same time, however, a number of large Member States got into difficulty and resisted interference from the Commission and the sanctions of their fellow finance ministers. Consequently, the Commission’s appropriate adjustment to make the pact more intelligent coincided with a battle for prestige among the Member States. Commissioner Almunia concentrated his efforts on sensible reform, but the eco-feminists wanted, above all, to create room for their own excuse to break the rules.
This has therefore been the subject of much heated debate and, in general, most criticism has been levelled at the latter. For example, the European Central Bank was very negative about this corrective aspect but was able to endorse the pact’s preventive section, while taking into account such factors as economic trends and long-term debt. That storm abated. The pact itself has not changed, but an estimate of those budgets is now available to us. The strange thing is that we have now adopted this regulation on this controversial corrective section, that this only falls within the scope of an advisory procedure and that this has now entered into effect since last time’s vote, but that we now have a regulation at second reading on this other, preventive section. I will leave this to one side for the time being.
In the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, a number of amendments to this regulation have therefore been adopted, but, as a qualified majority is required for those amendments to be adopted, the upshot could be that this regulation will not enter into force. I would therefore counsel against this, and advise this House to accept the situation as it is, as the Commission was sensible enough to do, for both regulations – the second of which we regard as more important than the first – can enter into force simultaneously. Mr Juncker has had a tough time lately, and we should at least let him have this success and result during the Luxembourg Presidency."@en1
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