Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-24-Speech-2-052"
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"en.20001024.3.2-052"2
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".
Mr President, the issue I wish to discuss is far more specific, even though it must be said that some of us consider reinforced cooperation to be the panacea to combat the hypothetical freezing of the European integration process, supposedly inevitable due to the increase in the number of Member States following the next round of enlargement.
Mr President, I have had the satisfaction of noting that the proposals presented recently at the Intergovernmental Conference coincide in the main with all or some of the criteria I have set out. I hope that the spirit of Biarritz that we have talked about so much today will materialise, as spirits that do not materialise become ghosts and the attic of European construction is full of such ghosts.
Finally, I must thank the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and its chairman for the kindness with which they received my report, the contributions which enabled me to improve it and the tremendous support that was given in the final vote. With this support, Mr President, and in the hope that our resolution will be useful in this final, decisive stage of the Intergovernmental Conference, I ask the House to vote for this report.
Some would consider this to be the equivalent of throwing a lifebelt to enable certain states to survive the shipwreck of Community construction, and to others it involves creating a hard core of supposedly elite countries, or
states, as we would say in Spanish, states that would, by virtue of their power, cohesion and weight, act as a veritable cabinet.
There are also, Mr President, those who see reinforced cooperation as the ideal instrument with which to create an “
Europe” or a “variable geometry Europe”, in which Community solidarity and cohesion would be diluted in a range of various intergovernmental cooperation schemes. This would be a Europe that is neither democratic, nor efficient, nor transparent, but simply a self-service organisation.
None of these approaches seems acceptable or realistic to me. My report therefore simply suggests making the existing provisions more flexible by following clear and coherent criteria:
First, we must establish cooperation within the Community framework and not in parallel intergovernmental operations. Europe cannot be brought closer to the citizens by making its structure more and more complicated.
Second, we must maintain the unity of Parliament and the Commission and increase their participation in both establishing and developing reinforced cooperation. The experience of the Maastricht Social Protocol and of Economic and Monetary Union show that the participation of all the members of these Institutions is technically feasible and politically advisable, and preserves the coherence of the system and the participation of all European citizens in decisions that affect them all the time. Dividing up legislative and executive powers or replacing them with a greater number of bodies, secretariats, parallel chambers and the like does not lead to democracy but to inefficiency.
Third, we must increase the scope of reinforced cooperation to include the common foreign and security policy and the common defence policy, which in the last few years have been crying out for a Community channel to avoid the dispersion, slowness and inefficiency that end up transferring decisions and the task of solving specifically European problems to the United States of America.
Fourth, we must eliminate the veto and reduce the minimum number of Member States required to set in motion Community reinforced cooperation. I say “Community”, ladies and gentlemen, because this is what we are talking about, making Community instruments more powerful instead of replacing them. The dividing line between those who want a political Europe and those who want to reduce it to a market lies in strengthening the Community rather than intergovernmental operations, and not the opposite, as the President of the Commission explained quite recently in this Assembly. We do not need a Europe with divergent objectives, but a Europe with a common objective, albeit with various speeds.
Finally, we need reinforced cooperation that is open, not closed, and which includes rather than excludes those current or future members that do not sign up immediately – a form of reinforced cooperation that acts as an impetus instead of creating further obstacles."@en1
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