Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-07-04-Speech-3-154-000"
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"en.20120704.25.3-154-000"2
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"Mr President, it is very obvious why people are not investing in Europe: our costs are too high, our labour market is too rigid, our taxes are too high. We are witnessing an epochal shift in power and wealth. We still look at these old maps which have Europe at the middle, we do not realise the extent to which the centre of gravity has shifted to the Pacific.
And the reason it has happened is very easily identified. For 500 years the secret of Europe’s success was our diversity, our variety, our pluralism, the fact that instead of becoming a single empire we remained a plurality of competing states, each trialling new ideas, each striving to outdo its competitors.
The tragedy of our generation is that, just as the great civilisations of Asia have learnt the secret of decentralisation, we in Europe are going in the opposite direction. We are following the Ming, Mogul, Ottoman path towards more uniformity, more bureaucracy, more taxation and more harmonisation. There is nothing inevitable about this. We are the authors of our own poverty. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’"@en1
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