Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-14-Speech-3-045"
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"en.20010214.3.3-045"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Lisbon Summit has bequeathed a great heritage. It defined a major task and disseminated a courageous idea: that by the year 2010 Europe will become the most competitive area in the world. The summit placed its bets on the best Europe has to offer. It stated that we are on the road towards full employment. It also made it clear that we want to stake our hopes on the innovative power of the people of the European Union, on their ability to educate and train themselves, to take their destiny into their own hands, and to bring about their own prosperity and that of their families. This is the strongest productive force that Europe can release.
This central idea logically leads to a political approach which says that economic reform, social involvement, social cohesion and job creation go hand in hand. They are interacting facets of one and the same process along this path to success, and they must be of mutual support. They must not be played off against each other.
For many of us this is a challenge to our way of thinking. Many people who have striven their entire lives to achieve a common liberalised market will have to make some mental effort to realise that only social cohesion and employment policies can produce the social productivity which will make the common market a success. Others, who have prided themselves all their lives on the achievements of the Member States, will also have to make some mental effort to realise that the new enlarged common market calls for concerted efforts and new rules to ensure that the process to achieve success can be implemented everywhere.
The Stockholm Summit comes precisely at this decisive moment. It will decide whether the ambitious goals of Lisbon can be implemented, or whether the citizens of Europe think that we are dealing with nicely worded but empty statements which would have no real impact on political reality. Those who want success in Stockholm must measure and compare how far we have come along the road to success. Above all, they must have the courage to set new ambitious targets so that we can move further along the road to success.
We are told that concrete objectives are difficult to set. Of course they are. But just take a complex issue like inflation rates, which is dependent on many decentralised actors making clever decisions. On the way to economic and monetary union we clearly managed to introduce a very successful process which has led to success which we would not have believed possible up until a few years ago. Take a complex issue like interest rate trends or the dismantling of excessive national debt. We have achieved all this with a common effort, and these are all complex matters which call for more than one participant. If we can achieve all this, then we will surely manage to give every schoolchild in the European Union access to the Internet. We will be able to set up conditions in which all schoolchildren will not only have access to the Internet but will make decisive progress in the rest of their school curriculum to ensure that, when they enter the European labour market, they will have the opportunities they need.
If we can achieve all this, then we will surely be able to offer every entrepreneur in the European Union a clear, easily comprehensible and simple regulatory framework, which operates in exactly the same way in Spain, Greece, Italy and Germany alike. If we can achieve all this, then we will surely be able to call upon the strongest productive power in Europe. We will be able to offer the still more than 14 million unemployed in the European Union real opportunities of taking part in this process of bringing about success.
We still have an employment rate of over 8% and I would like to draw your attention to a situation which was given short shrift in the debate in the Commission: the fact that we have a youth unemployment rate which is twice as high. This is a major problem, especially since we are saying here today that we want to make the demographic change manageable, and we want to rely on the intelligence in people’s heads and invest in heads. Much more could be done in practical terms to combat youth unemployment and to invest in the future of Europe. But for that very reason it is also proper for the Commission, in a preparatory paper in the run-up to Stockholm, to propose that in Stockholm we should look at very specific goals to increase the employment rate to 67% by 2005 and to strengthen the participation of women in the labour force to 57%.
These are the right goals to set and we, as the European Parliament, as the representatives of the people of Europe, want to see these goals documented in the final report of the Stockholm Summit. We think it is important that the people of Europe read about targets which they can readily understand, with which they can identify and in which they can see that their prospects of success in Europe lie. This will also help us to decide whether there is acceptance of the necessary enlargement of the European Union, which we all want. But we must also send out a clear signal that all who are currently disadvantaged and who want to contribute their resources will have the opportunity to do so. Whoever wants to must move forward courageously and overcome the rivalries between the European institutions. The people of Europe do not understand the petty jealousies over the allocation of competences. It must be made clear that the European Council is assuming its leadership role and that Parliament is taking up its proper place, the place to which it is entitled as the directly elected representative of the people of Europe."@en1
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