Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-25-Speech-3-013"
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"en.20070425.2.3-013"2
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".
Mr President, what exactly does the transatlantic economic partnership have in store for us?
According to Mrs Merkel, it will not mean free trade or a common market, but the regulation of markets, the protection of patents, the harmonisation of rules and cooperation aimed at improving the world’s economic governance. Her Secretary of State, Mr Würmeling, was more direct in stating that the aim was to move in the direction of an unrestricted transatlantic market. The Chancellor herself did, incidentally, imply that the experiment of the European single market could serve as a model for this new area.
Do I need to remind you of the definition of this single market provided by the Commissioner in charge of monitoring it, Mr McCreevy? As he pointed out, the single market ‘is by far the greatest deregulation exercise in Europe’s recent history’. Is it indeed this experiment, then, that we should replicate across the Atlantic?
The question deserves all the more to be asked because this project already has a turbulent history. It was in March 1998 that the then figurehead of liberal Europe, Commissioner Leon Brittan, launched the New Transatlantic Market project, modelled on the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. At the same time, top secret negotiations were taking place at the OECD on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the MAI, which was already designed to track down any legislation perceived by investors as an obstacle to their ever-expanding financial operations.
These two projects caused such an outcry among Europeans that they had to be abandoned. Since then, however, lobbies such as the Transatlantic Business Dialogue have continually brought this strategic project up for discussion, albeit in a new form. The adoption, last year, of the US accounting standards and, more recently, the buyout of the European Euronext exchange by the New York Stock Exchange are part of this disturbing trend.
Far from the image of constructive cooperation being sold to us, we are indeed talking here about a major front in the battle over the way in which Europe’s future is to be conceived. What are at stake are both Europe’s model of society and its democratic identity. I would point out that the report adopted on this subject last June by our Parliament regretted that ‘the EU-US relationship is overshadowed to a considerable extent by political conflict and is quite often characterised by rhetoric’.
For the sake of the common values of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, are we going to have to keep quiet about the war in Iraq or about Guantanamo? About the death penalty or the International Criminal Court? About Kyoto or GMOs? About personal data, the SWIFT affair, or CIA flights? At a time when the process designed to lead to a new European treaty is under way, the nature of the relations between the European Union and the United States is a crucial issue that will need to be handled with great clarity."@en1
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