Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-119"
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"en.20001212.6.2-119"2
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"Mr President, we have already made a thorough assessment of what happened in Nice, but we should remember that Nice began with a very restricted agenda. The Council asked this Parliament not to broaden the agenda because the intention was to concentrate exclusively on the Amsterdam leftovers. The Council said it wanted to do this in order to make the European Union's institutions operationally efficient so that it could work better with 27 Member States than it does today with 15. What was the result of this exercise and this work? The result was, in fact, that the most fundamental and important factor for introducing operational efficiency, decisiveness, flexibility and workability into institution operations was not dealt with at all. What the Council concentrated on most were questions of power; in other words in Nice there were too many calculators and not enough policies. The images coming out of Nice showed a Europe in which every country was trying to look after itself, suggesting that the Europe of the future will be a battle between the large and small countries. I wonder whether these might not be arguments that better serve the interests of the Euro-sceptics and Europe’s enemies. I wonder whether this image we have been given of Nice might not be an appeal to the conscience of convinced Europeans, those who do not just want a single market, those who do not just want a single currency, in the face of what I regard as this "non-time" for Europe.
In my view, Nice was the second part of Amsterdam and we are now in a phase, an interval, between Amsterdam and an IGC to be held in 2004 but with an unknown end-date. Right now it is the duty of convinced pro-Europeans to counter the image that came out of Nice and say that solidarity for us has a meaning and that it is possible to build a Europe in which large and small countries can coexist peacefully; in other words, there are no expendable countries in this European project and national egos are nonsense in this Europe. So I should now like to appeal to the House and the Commission: somebody has to put the case for this European project. The case for the European project is that it is not the sum of national interests but a joint project, as President Romano Prodi has said, and the institutions must now look to the future and join hands so that enlargement can take place, so that the citizens can look on Europe as we would like them to and so that politics can go back to building the European project rather than just upholding power, particularly the power of the larger countries."@en1
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