Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-05-Speech-2-098"
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"en.20050705.22.2-098"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your warm welcome and I thank you, in particular, Mr President, for the cordial words with which you chose to present me.
The fundamental principle of subsidiarity has to be interpreted as a principle of political cohesion, allowing bottom-up participation in Community decision-making, starting from the thousands and thousands of town councils in our Union. The European Union has to exist starting from those levels.
Europe also needs physical cohesion, transport and communication structures, which make Europeans more united while respecting the environment and the countryside.
Lastly, Europe, which invented the welfare state, needs social cohesion. We cannot allow substantial disparities in living standards to persist among countries and consequently among the peoples to whom our international personality offers united representation. Europe consequently calls for the historical objective of convergence and cohesion to be achieved by means of appropriate policies for managing the economy.
I have always believed, first as a banker and then as a politician, that the principle of free trade in the economic culture of the Union means being able to speak to the market in the language of the market, but that it cannot mean indulging all of its whims.
It is the lack of political will from national governments that prevents their budget policies from being effectively coordinated. That makes it difficult for the Union to use a common fund, partly made up of Europe’s borrowing on the international credit market, to finance major infrastructure works of European interest and important
common research and innovation initiatives, and to create a legacy of common public assets. The Lisbon Strategy is the first link in a chain that should lead to the European economy being governable. The national governments must send out a precise message, made convincing by the allocation of public resources. The sought-after flexibilities must be utilised by businesses in order to gain in competitiveness and to increase their production base and sales in Europe and worldwide.
Europe has to revive its own commitment to major Community projects. We have been successful on many occasions, including in recent years, for instance in CERN and the European Space Agency, with the ITER and Galileo projects, which have been a decisive step forward in strengthening Europe’s technological capabilities, and with the Erasmus project, which has opened up new European horizons to over a million young people. Airbus too is an example of what we can do together if we only unite.
We can also look with confidence at the resourcefulness of the euro zone, which is now presided over by Jean-Claude Juncker, to whom I send my best wishes, partly on account of our long friendship and collaboration. The euro is the greatest demonstration of the united will of the European people, and a driving force of political integration. It is an encouraging sign of confidence that six of the ten accession countries have already begun to take part in SME 2, thus taking the first important steps towards joining the euro zone. The tangible benefits of taking part in the single currency are there for all to see: protection from imbalances on the exchange market, low interest rates and strengthened competition in those countries of the euro zone that have adopted virtuous policies.
It is a deeply felt honour for me to speak in the most elevated surroundings of European democracy, to make the voice of the Republic of Italy heard in the heart of the constitutional system of the Union. It is with conviction that I use the adjective ‘constitutional’, because such is the legal system that we have been building together for 50 years, treaty after treaty.
The European Union is not, and cannot be, just an economic free trade zone.
It is above all, and has been since its beginnings, a political structure, a land of rights, a constitutional reality that does not contradict our beloved national Constitutions, but connects them and completes them. It is a political structure that does not deny the identity of our nation states, but strengthens them in the face of the large-scale challenges of an increasingly broad horizon. It is a land of rights, to which every other inhabitant of this planet can look with the confidence that here, more than anywhere else, the values of human beings are respected. The ambitious definition given to the Union by the Constitutional Treaty is a legitimate one, that is to say, ‘a special area of human hope’.
From this position we must all go forward together, whether we be the 11 Member States which, like Italy, have already ratified the Constitutional Treaty, the Member States that are still to do so, or the two Member States that have said no. A single institutional framework joins us together irreversibly. It is already strong enough to enable us together to do many things for our citizens, in order to regain the popular consensus on the Treaty that has been lacking in many countries and to strengthen our institutions, which we have inherited from a successful past.
Precisely because we are already a political and constitutional body, we can indeed realistically assess the meaning of the rejection seen in two countries linked from the start to the European project. As little as a few months ago, on the occasion of the formal signing in Rome of the Constitutional Treaty by the 25 governments of the Union, the single project met with widespread consent. Within the space of a few months, the fear spread that the citizens were excluded from crucial decisions regarding their future and concerns heightened over the lack of economic growth. Is it really legitimate, however, to interpret the outcome of the referenda as disaffection with European unity? Is it legitimate to give in to the temptation of completely challenging the very project of the founding fathers?
If we raise our eyes, the Treaty of Rome of October 2004 rather appears to be the scapegoat of widespread unrest that does not so much relate to institutional order as to the government policies of the Union. We even note a paradox. The persistent call for a political revival of the Union, which is more urgent than the also necessary institutional reforms are, bears witness to the awareness of the common destiny on which a Constitution is really based. That is why we now have to think about the Union’s policies for the future, without, however, abandoning the constitutional design outlined by the industrious Convention.
What does the future urgently demand of our Europe? Above all, to borrow from Ortega y Gasset, it demands that
the backbone of the Union should consist of measures of political cohesion, physical cohesion and social cohesion."@en1
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