Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-25-Speech-2-475-000"
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"en.20111025.28.2-475-000"2
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".
Mr President, we must agree on where we are now, apart from being in the middle of a crisis. I must say that, in recent days and weeks, it has seemed to me that we are in the Europe of the 19th century rather than the 21st century. I have the feeling that we are in the Europe of sometime around 1815, after the Congress of Vienna, when people talked of a ‘concert of the great powers’, because, despite all the talk about European unity, European solutions and a community method, and the fact that we need to promote supranational solutions above the level of national solutions, in the past 14 days, I have seen only two national leaders running the whole show and taking decisions here. One of these was a Chancellor and one a President, who even berated another premier. They recommended that he keep quiet. I am no federalist, and Mr Schuman and Mr Monet are not great favourites of mine, but I would say that this does not sound very European and both gentlemen are perhaps turning in their graves.
As for the crisis itself, it is still the same story, and it is simply a situation in which we are making taxpayers pick up the bill for irresponsible behaviour. The irresponsible behaviour of banks and financial institutions, which acted as if they were in a casino, the irresponsible behaviour of states that bought off voters by throwing around public money which, in reality, they did not have, and we are proposing to ‘Europeanise’ the resulting debts, transfer them to everyone, and redeem them in the name of saving the euro, but it makes no difference what we call it.
I have the feeling that no one here reads the papers, and no one reads the economic editorials, because no decision will be taken tomorrow. Tomorrow, the EU will only buy time for one year, for two years, perhaps for three years, but afterwards we will be in the same situation again. Let us be aware, let us admit – many of you here admit it in the corridors but lack the courage to say it openly – that the euro is not a project for all, that a situation will inevitably come about where not all of the current euro area members will be able to continue in the project, because they will have to undergo a controlled bankruptcy, and they will have to undergo devaluation. You know it and you talk about it in the corridors, but you are unfortunately afraid to say it aloud. So tomorrow we will just be buying time. This is the most traditional approach, perhaps the most comfortable, the most costly, and the least credible one for the markets, and it is not statesmanlike. A statesman can be distinguished from a politician by the fact that he has the courage to adopt non-traditional solutions and knows how to make people believe in them, and knows how to carry them through. Tomorrow, therefore, we will learn, among other things, whether there really is a statesman in Europe, or whether we have mere politicians here."@en1
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