Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-31-Speech-3-027"
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"en.20060531.9.3-027"2
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".
Mr President, it is hard to respond in just four minutes to such a tour de force about the future of Europe. My group welcomes the presence here of Mr Verhofstadt, both as a prime minister and as one of the major architects of European reform.
We need to make our period of reflection a period of analysis, producing proposals on how to proceed. This month’s Interparliamentary Conference on the Future of Europe kick-started the process. Today’s sitting is the logical extension, and let us hear more debates with national leaders.
On Europe Day, Estonia became the fifteenth state to ratify the Constitution and Finland will soon follow. To me, that Treaty looks far from dead, and with the political courage of leaders like Guy Verhofstadt, Angela Merkel and Romano Prodi – leaders committed to Europe – then Europe’s future is surely brighter.
As the Prime Minister told us, we have a lot of work to do. However, we have the people of Europe behind us in our task, because they recognise, however much some of our national leaders like to deny it, that the big problems we face, the major challenges of globalisation – population growth and migration, climate change, internationally organised crime – cannot be dealt with by nation states built on the 18th-century concept of military industrial power; they require us to overcome our tribal and our religious hatreds and to work together for the future of all our citizens on a planet which we share with
others.
As you recognised, Prime Minister, in the Laeken Declaration in 2001, the European Union has been talking more to itself than to its citizens. Yet five years after your Presidency, the task of reconnecting Europe with its citizens still shows too little evidence of progress. Indeed, just yesterday a survey showed that 82% – more than four in five – of our fellow citizens feel that government at European level fails to communicate with them.
Despite the year-long period of reflection – and eight months into the Commission’s much vaunted plans – little has been broadcast beyond the bastions of the Berlaymont.
However, the same survey might hold the seeds of hope, for though Europe may not be brilliant at communicating what it does, that survey shows that our citizens still trust the European institutions to do it. In fact, more of them trust the European institutions than their own national governments.
So here is Europe’s mandate from the people: a mandate to deliver the reforms needed to meet challenges like energy security, migration, climate change and organised crime, which individual Member States struggle to deal with under the current set-up. Greater coordination of economic policies, as you recommended, Mr Verhofstadt, would certainly help, as would greater defence coordination.
Mr Barroso has pointed to the need for practical achievements to reinforce our links with citizens and rally them to our cause.
But this ‘Europe of Projects’ can never get off the ground until Member State governments explain to their people what they are doing together in Brussels and why, and until we give the Union the money and the legal powers to push through initiatives like the common energy policy, which faces an uphill struggle against blocking forces in the Council, as too do many other initiatives in the field of justice and home affairs, for example, where the absence of qualified majority voting so often results in stalemate.
Quibbling over the
clause in the Treaty will resolve little, and change rests, in any case, on the same unanimity which has led to inaction up to now.
As you said, Prime Minister, it is the Constitution – as practical as it is ideological – that can best put the institutional building blocks in place to move Europe forward. It is all very well for Mr Schulz to rail against it, but it was his Socialists in France who helped to kill the Constitution in that referendum."@en1
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