Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-05-Speech-3-010"
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"en.20060705.2.3-010"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in order to pay tribute to the Italian football team, I shall begin my speech in Italian.
Enlargement and the Constitution are two sides of the same coin. I now read in a report from Reuters – I have no idea as to whether it is true or false; you can explain that to us – that you, after the meeting with Mr Vanhanen, what one might call the teambuilding in Helsinki, told a press conference that we could also enlarge on the basis of the Treaty of Nice. The Reuters report may well be wrong, and in that case you should tell us what the truth of the matter is.
I am grateful for the opportunity given to us to talk about the third pillar. The deficit that you described, and also the examples that the President of the Commission adduced of the failure to transpose legislation on security policy and third-pillar cooperation, are things that need to be dealt with. Nowhere are the European people more in favour of power at the European level than when it comes to the combating of organised crime, a well-ordered immigration policy, a safe asylum policy and properly secured borders, but nowhere – as Mr Barroso rightly said – are we less effective than in these areas. You are right to say that we need the ‘passerelle’ clause, but that has nothing to do with any ‘cherry-picking’ approach to the Constitution. You only have to read the Treaty of Nice to see that it already provides for a transfer from the third pillar to the first, subject to unanimous approval by the Council, five years following its entry into force, and so we are acting within the bounds set by a valid Treaty.
While we are on this subject, let me make a final observation. When talking about the third pillar, we are talking about the chapter that also describes citizens’ freedoms and rights in Europe. When talking about the Constitution, we are also talking about the Charter of Fundamental Rights, but then we must, even now, start asking the Presidents of the Council and the Commission to be more pro-active in dealing with the populist development in Europe, of which we in this House are made aware on a daily basis. We now have, in the European Union, governments – and that is bad enough – that are supported by right-wing populist parties, some of them openly racist and xenophobic, and these are sitting in the European Council – not as backbenchers in some parliament or other, but as active members of European institutions.
I myself saw an example of this during yesterday’s debate on Francoism, in which one of the speakers was a non-attached Member of this House, whose son is the Deputy Prime Minister of Poland; here, in this House, he openly defended the Franco regime. This is not some sort of random event; the fact is that more and more governments in the European Union are starting, through their failure to take action against it, to make populism respectable, and that constitutes a serious threat to fundamental freedoms in Europe. I would ask the President-in-Office of the Council to take a more serious approach to addressing this issue, not least at Council level, for when democracy is threatened, it is most often from within rather than from without.
Mr President, you see before you an unhappy German group chairman, but a happy socialist one. Most of my colleagues from Italy are not here this morning. Their absence is excusable.
In his speech, Mr Vanhanen said that ‘we need more Europe', and he was right, for the things your presidency has chosen as the headings for the chapters in its programme – such things as the challenge of globalisation, the new Lisbon strategy, energy, partnership – all these things are now beyond the capacity of nation states to resolve.
Not one single EU Member State, be it large or small, can now handle the challenges, whether economic, environmental or social, that we face today, and it is for that reason that we have to develop the European Union further, the reason why we have to entrench it. Indeed, there are those who say that we want to offer our people, who face this global challenge, the framework that Europe needs in order to keep its head above water in international competition, and what they need is more Europe. For the sake of consistency, though, if they are to have this ‘more Europe’, they have to supply the framework that Europe needs.
In this Union of 25 – which will soon comprise 27 states – we cannot resolve the challenges that you rightly described with the means at our disposal; it is not possible. That is why your decision, as a consequence of what you described, to ratify the Constitution, was a way of saying, ‘we need this instrument’ and was, as such, a logical, right and therefore consistent decision to take.
In so doing, you have sent out the right signal at the very outset of your presidency, and that is something of which we Social Democrats are very much in favour.
Mr President of the Commission, you said, ‘we want to be a team with the Finnish Presidency of the Council’. That is terrific, and we are right there with you on that, but, in his speech just now, Mr Vanhanen had this to say:
‘I am convinced that an enlarging Union needs the Constitutional Treaty that was negotiated by its Member States.’"@en1
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