Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-18-Speech-3-237"

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"en.20060118.20.3-237"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as somebody brilliantly put it, for fifty years the European project has been a football match played behind closed doors. With the referendum on the Constitution in France and the Netherlands, the citizens who wanted to get in and watch from the terraces went beyond that and organised an actual invasion of the pitch. Today’s crisis in Europe also lies in the fact that it is no longer possible to go back behind closed doors, back to the Europe of the Treaties and elitist decisions, and that, at the same time, no one knows how to get the people back onto the terraces so that they can express their opinions properly as fans normally do. Reinventing a system of participation and accountability, whereby the Union answers directly to the citizens, without the self-seeking, distorting and misleading mediation of the Member States, is a prerequisite for setting the European project in motion again, whatever its new content may be. The question is, however, accountability for what? We must avoid the mistake of turning the pause for reflection into a pause of inaction. No Plan D will be a success if, in addition to the ‘D’ for ‘debate’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘democracy’, it does not also include ‘D’ for ‘delivery’. Delivery is the best context in which to recast the text of the Constitution, and the best way to make people understand just how useful Europe can be. That is why even self-inflicted failures, like today’s refusal to regulate market access to port services, can become symbolically dangerous. There are areas of recognised European competence in which the existing treaties already provide for qualified majority voting and the interinstitutional codecision procedure – transport is one example. There are also areas where subsidiarity should properly be interpreted in reverse: not letting the Member States do badly what can be done better at a European level. In these areas of competence, the Union must raise its delivery rate and dare to show how useful it can be. Today it is no longer enough to see the Union merely as a clever solution to the problems of war, including the Cold War. What we need is a Union that is equal to the global challenges of the third millennium. We are also reflecting in order to better understand what we must do tomorrow, but we must be careful not to let that be an excuse for any inaction on our part today, or we would risk invalidating all our reflection, no matter how clever it might be."@en1
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