Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-03-09-Speech-3-088-000"
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"en.20110309.7.3-088-000"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I believe, in all seriousness, we can say that we in Europe are standing at a crossroads, and it is a crossroads where two major crises require action on our part at the same time.
The first of these is the economic and financial crisis and, in its wake, also the euro crisis – dramatic consequences, in my view, of a one-sided and unsustainable development model based on debt and deregulation that, in our Member States and throughout Europe, increasingly destroyed the sustainability as well as the social cohesion and the achievement potential of the public budgets as the basis for that.
The other major crisis, of which we are much less aware, is what I see as a crisis of democracy and legitimacy, linked to the fact that we are able to take more and more decisions not in the nation state but beyond it, the result of which, as this is associated not with more but with less democracy, is that we lose the consent and the acceptance of the people. We should therefore consider very carefully what we do.
We believe that we do need a stability mechanism, it is just that we think that this one does not go deep enough, as it deals with the symptoms and not the causes. Intervention is one-sided and affects public expenditure, wages, salaries, pensions and social welfare. The enormous profits from speculation that have been and continue to be made and the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and income in Europe are not being tackled. We are not asking those who have made their profits from such speculation to dip into their pockets, and that means we are not going far enough.
My second point is that what we are doing here is establishing a mechanism outside of the Community method. Yet Europe is exactly the model of how such collaboration between States on their free initiative can be based on social cohesion and more democracy. Through the Treaty of Lisbon, we promised to prepare future Treaty revisions by means of a convention so that they would thus be subject to intensive democratic debate. Now, with the very first revision of the Treaty, we are doing the opposite. We do want this stability mechanism, but we do not want it at the expense of European democracy, citizen participation, at the expense of giving up the Community method. We do not want it in the form of a retreat to an intergovernmental Europe again but as a step forward to a more communal Europe with more participation and more democracy.
We have therefore tabled amendments to this effect relating both to the content and the methodology. We are in close contact with the rapporteurs. We have decided not to have a final vote today. I am hopeful that the progress that has emerged over recent days will mean that, in the end, we will be able to give our approval. We will only give our approval, however, if this pact takes us forwards and not if it leads to backward steps in our construction of a communal, democratic and social Europe."@en1
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