Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-24-Speech-2-014"
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to return to this House – as the French Presidency undertook to do on 3 October – to present the results of the Informal European Council in Biarritz to which, Madam President, you, as ever, made a highly valued contribution.
Lastly, certain other problems remain, not least in the field of non-discrimination and the environment. Significant progress has thus been made even if certain advances still have to be consolidated.
Concerning closer cooperation, all the Member States now agree on the value of this and acknowledge the need to inject flexibility into the arrangements for putting it into practice. Equally, they are all in agreement that these arrangements must remain open and accessible, that there is no question of moving towards a two-speed Europe, that the institutional framework of the Union must be respected and thus, in particular, the role of the Commission and that of the European Parliament, and, lastly, that there is a need to preserve the Community acquis, which is to say the internal market and cohesion policies involving closer cooperation. Finally, in the field of foreign, security and defence policy, I believe that specially tailored measures must be pinpointed in order to cater for the specific nature of the issues involved.
Concerning the Commission and the re-weighting of votes, two issues which are closely interrelated and politically charged, the discussions revealed a consensus on the need to make the Commission stronger and more effective. Having said that, I must admit that not a great deal was actually said, because there remains a very marked rift over how this is to be achieved. Some Member States advocate setting a definitive ceiling on the number of commissioners, in tandem with a rotation of posts among the Member States on an equal footing, while others champion a system of one Commissioner per Member State, without ruling out the possibility of a radical restructuring of the college. Both options remain on the table, and must be assessed in the light of their potential for ensuring that the common interests of the Community are safeguarded.
Concerning the weighting of votes, the two well-known systems also remain on the table: a simple re-weighting, in favour of which a narrow, very narrow majority is emerging, or a double majority system, but with alternative options, a double simple or double re-weighted majority, in other words a type of ‘demographic safety net’.
It is clear that we will only be able to take a decision on these issues after negotiations have come to a close; nevertheless, discussions based on detailed proposals must continue in order to prepare for the final decision at Nice.
Work will now continue in a very intensive manner up to Nice, on the basis of the informal guidelines adopted by this European Council. We thus have a little under fifty days left. The preparatory group therefore met yesterday to work on qualified majority voting and on closer cooperation, on very concrete bases. It also went into greater detail in its work on amending Article 7 of the Treaty in accordance with the positive guidelines laid down at Biarritz.
The preparatory group is to play a full role up until 19 November, the date of the next ministerial level meeting. We will therefore hold a total of six ministerial-level working sessions between now and Nice. Four of these will be mini-sessions and two will take the form of a conclave, and we expect to turn all these occasions to good account in order to keep alive the Biarritz spirit.
Finally, a word on a related subject, but one which I know to be of fundamental importance for the European Parliament: the Charter of Fundamental Rights. I can tell you that the European Council unanimously commended the quality of this text, which can therefore be formally proclaimed at Nice in the form that it was transmitted by the Convention. The matter of its incorporation into the Treaties was quite rightly not dealt with at Biarritz. It is nevertheless clear that the majority of Member States are not yet prepared to do this, and it is my belief – this is not my wish, but simply my impression – that it will only be possible to formally raise this issue further down the line.
I will now turn to international issues, which were also very much to the fore at Biarritz. You will all be aware of the events that were going on at the time this Summit was held with, on the one hand, the situation in the Middle East, and on the other the political changes in Serbia, which found expression in the visit to Biarritz by the new President of Serbia, Mr Kostunica.
I will not dwell on the events in the Middle East. I will simply point out that, right from the outset, the European Union has called on both sides to strive to put an end to the violence, to reopen dialogue and safeguard what had been achieved at Camp David, and the Biarritz European Council called both sides to a summit meeting. The European Union continued to make its voice heard, the voice of reason and conciliation, at Sharm-el-Sheikh, where it was represented for the first time by Mr Solana, the High Representative for the CFSP – a fact that I would emphasise as I do not subscribe to the opinion that Europe is playing a diminished role in the Middle East, but actually one that is becoming gradually more important again. Unfortunately, it has proved impossible since Sharm-el-Sheikh to implement the agreement worked out there, and the tensions on both sides remain considerable, to say the least, with the European Union therefore monitoring the situation with the greatest of vigilance. We must recapture the spirit that reigned in the Oslo Agreements, and this is the ambition of this Presidency, all the Member States, the High Representative, and the Commission and Parliament.
As I have mentioned previously, most of the time available was taken up with the institutional reforms currently being examined at the Intergovernmental Conference, which I think was as it should be, and I will therefore begin with them.
The second event that stood out at Biarritz, for the right reasons this time, was the return of democracy to Serbia and, more than this, the repercussions of the political changes in Belgrade on relations between that country and the European Union. I am sure that the events leading up to the investiture of Vojislav Kostunica will still be fresh in your minds. This investiture and these events have seen a completely new political order being installed in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, opening the way to the democratisation of the country and, let us hope, a more widespread reconciliation in the Balkans.
The European Union has honoured its commitments and responded to this political turnaround at the meeting of the General Affairs Council on 9 October, at which it decided to lift the sanctions, including the oil and air embargoes, imposed on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1998, with the exception of course of sanctions directly aimed at Mr Milosevic and his entourage. President Kostunica therefore accepted the invitation from the Presidency to go to Biarritz and have lunch with Heads of State and Government. At the joint press conference he held alongside the French Presidency, Mr Kostunica expressed his heartfelt joy at being welcomed into the European family, for this is exactly what is happening.
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia will, of course, very soon benefit from the instruments that have been set in place by the Union to cover the entire Balkan region, beginning with the CARDS programme and also the activities of the European Agency for Reconstruction. Furthermore, the General Affairs Council confirmed the Union’s intention to contribute to re-establishing navigation on the Danube and to actively participate in modernising infrastructures in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia within a regional context. Moreover, without prejudice to a needs assessment and the coordination of economic and financial assistance to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which are to be the joint responsibility of the European Commission and the World Bank, the Biarritz European Council decided to grant the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia initial emergency humanitarian aid totalling EUR 200 million.
Lastly, and I will end here – this is without doubt the most important decision in the medium and long term – the Union has decided to provide this country with a political prospect by proposing that it conclude a stabilisation and association agreement along the lines of those currently being negotiated with the other countries in the same region. It was precisely with this in mind that President Kostunica was invited, as you will be aware, to take part in the summit meeting between the European Union and the countries of the western Balkans, which is to be held in Zagreb, at the instigation of the President of the French Republic, on 24 November.
These are the issues that can be singled out concerning the developments and situation in Serbia and their repercussions for the Union. I feel that the important thing was for the Union to very swiftly communicate to this country not only a tangible message of encouragement but also, and I would stress this point, the political prospect of its full and comprehensive integration into the European family. I believe that this message has been clearly given. We can only hope that the process of democratisation is able to continue under optimum conditions. These, in a nutshell, were the results of the Biarritz European Council which was, and I say this in all sincerity because I believe it to be true, highly productive and therefore of great value to the step forward that the Union is of course still to complete.
As to the IGC, I believe that work at ministerial level had already progressed as far as it could before Biarritz, and this Informal Council thus came at the just the right time to consolidate certain advances and to lay down guidelines for the final phase of the work, on which we have now embarked.
At Biarritz we established, first of all, and I believe that this is fundamental, a general consensus on the need to bring about an ambitious treaty at Nice. I have christened this the ‘Biarritz spirit’. Next, tangible progress was made on qualified majority voting and closer cooperation. Lastly, there came what I will call the opening up of a substantive debate at the highest level on the two most sensitive issues: the re-weighting of votes and the Commission, which has enabled us to truly enter into discussions on these two tricky issues.
Let me expand on the issue of qualified majority voting. A fairly broad consensus was reached on over half of the items under discussion, while ways of arriving at potential solutions to sensitive issues were also outlined
Thus, while certain deep-seated reservations persist concerning taxation, some form of progress will still be possible thanks to the technical adjustments that the Presidency is to look into with the help of the Commission. We have established that there is a clear desire to open up to cooperation in the area of combating tax fraud, and this is no small thing.
I feel that we should also be able to make headway in the field of social affairs, on the proviso that we do not tamper with the principles that underpin the various national social security systems, which gives us some room for manoeuvre.
Progress will also be possible in the field of external trade policy, but only when we find a way of dealing with the most sensitive issues on a specific basis and also avert a backdoor extension of Community competences.
In the field of justice and home affairs, I am optimistic that a solution will be found concerning judicial cooperation in civil cases. On the other hand, issues relating to asylum, visas and immigration are still proving much more sensitive."@en1
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