Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-18-Speech-2-019"
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"en.20071218.5.2-019"2
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"Mr President, it is often said that the exception proves the rule and this Presidency proved no exception!
Too often we are proffered fine words and vaulting ambitions from Presidency programmes honoured more in the breach than the observance. But, by resurrecting a Treaty that we all thought dead and buried, you have showed the improbable is indeed possible. From here on in, Lisbon will be etched on our memories as the moment Europe gave itself the tools and tenacity to make globalisation work for us, not against us.
Politics would not be politics if we let major successes obscure minor failures. While the Lisbon Treaty is an undisputed success, one should beware of hubris. The Lisbon Summit, while symbolically important, may have pushed Europe and Africa further apart. Consensus on EPAs is receding as swiftly as EU assurances to put trade at the service of development.
What happened to the great debate on flexicurity? Your big idea for revitalising Europe’s economy, which fizzled out before we failed even to define it? Where is the blue card for migration? Or greater labour mobility within the Union? Or linking the Lisbon and Gothenburg Agendas through full unbundling and cuts in CO2?
You say you have left your mark on justice and home affairs, but watch out. Data-sharing arrangements are dangerously ahead of arrangements for data protection and data security.
On the positive side of the ledger: European leadership in Bali, an excellent agreement on next year’s EU budget, the constructive abstentions you engineered to give us a common policy on Kosovo are tribute to the skills of your ministers.
And, thanks to your courage and determination, Prime Minister, Europe’s bigger Member States can only retard rapid progress for so long. For, come 2009, when qualified majority voting is in place, when Parliament holds power of codecision and vetoes can no longer hold Europe hostage, the progressive majority, the centrist majority will succeed in making Europe’s choices black and white, unblemished by any blotch of brown.
Europe may have lost Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, but you have understood well what Shakespeare called the ‘the tide of pomp that beats upon the high shore of this world’. And, as befits the leader of a great seafaring nation, you have caught it on the ebb."@en1
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