Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-13-Speech-1-034"
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"en.20000313.2.1-034"2
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"Mr President-in-Office, I listened to your speech with great interest and it is obvious that in overall terms, no one here today could fail to agree with what you have said. You have made statements of intent, which correspond to the vision we all share of the problems of jobs and of Europe in general. From this point of view, we must also think about one of the objectives for the Lisbon Summit that you mentioned, namely combating the political deficit in Europe. It is precisely because I think that if we continue to do nothing but make broad statements of this kind, we will find it hard to overcome this political deficit, that I would like to ask you a few specific questions in order to try to understand what policy will be implemented under your presidency after the Lisbon Summit.
My first question, which is a very direct one, is about an institutional issue which we now have the opportunity to discuss with you for the first time as President-in-Office of the European Council. This concerns the most serious political problem we have had to face in recent times – the problem of Austria. The question that I would like to ask very clearly is this: are you representing 14 EU countries here or 15? This is a perfectly sensible question because as President-in-Office of the European Union, you have worked and acted as the spokesperson for bilateral decisions between states. From this point of view, this question is perfectly sensible and requires the clearest possible answer.
I think that in institutional terms, it is an extremely serious matter that we are moving towards replacing collegiate decisions, which the European Union is bound to observe under the Treaty, by means of bilateral decisions between governments. I am not talking about the causes of the Austrian issue. I am talking about the serious precedent that we might be setting if today we replace the collegiate procedure stipulated in the Treaties by means of bilateral decisions, in this case aimed at one particular country, because tomorrow we might adopt the same approach towards a different country or countries. That is my first question.
My second question is about the Employment Summit. I firmly believed, particularly because I attended the discussions on including the employment problem on the Council agenda, and on the European Union agenda, that the original idea of the Employment Summit was to combat the problems, not of the new knowledge-based economy, but of the old European economy, the problems of unemployment in factories, dockyards, iron and steelworks, and that these were the employment problems which were originally due to be on the Employment Summit agenda. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to raise the question of whether, when we talk about the problems of the new knowledge-based economy and of the new digital economy, which, as far as I know have created unemployment rather than employment in Europe, we are not replacing an inability to deal with the problems of unemployment in the present by what has largely been – and still is today – empty rhetoric about the problems of employment in the future… No one understands better than us the crucial role that the Internet, the digital economy and the knowledge-based economy have to play, but these issues were not what the Employment Summit was originally intended for.
Mr President-in-Office, you concluded on a vaguely ideological note, which is fair enough. If this is the Social Democrats’ policy for the economy of the future, then I would like to remind you that one of the most serious problems of the Internet economy and Europe’s lagging behind is the lack of entrepreneurial spirit in the education system, in the behaviour of governments and in the way the institutions function. This is what we must counter if we are to guarantee the knowledge-based economy of the future."@en1
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