Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-07-03-Speech-2-031"
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"en.20010703.1.2-031"2
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"Mr President, I, too, would like to congratulate the Swedish presidency on a very successful first presidency of the Union. Notwithstanding that a handful of extremist demonstrators tried to spoil it in Göteborg, we will ultimately look back on solid achievements under your presidency of the Council.
I say the words "presidency of the Council" advisedly because it is not, of course, the presidency of the Union. Every institution has its own president. We have Mrs Fontaine, the Commission has Mr Prodi, the Council has a Member State government by rotation. There is actually no such thing as a presidency of the Union, yet every presidency often presents itself as the President of the Union. This contributes to a feeling in public opinion that puts too much weight on the presidency. Expectations are raised too high. But when you take over the presidency you are not assuming executive office, you are taking the chairmanship of one of the institutions with an inherited agenda for a very short period of time, and people expect too much of it. That is why there are sometimes disappointments at the end of the presidency. Less so this time – and that is because you have done so well – but I would advise future presidencies not to build themselves up into something that they are not, and to get down to the solid work that is necessary for what that post really means.
Your greatest success has been in accelerating the enlargement negotiations and it now looks as though all the candidate countries except Romania and Bulgaria could well be in by the time of the next European elections. That means that this Parliament will have at least 732 Members, possibly more. It will be many more if there is any slippage in that timetable, because any country that has not signed its accession treaty by the beginning of 2004, but comes in during the next Parliament, will have its MEPs added on top of the 732. That is going to cause huge administrative and financial problems for this Parliament. We will do our best to deal with that, but I suspect that, if there are problems, we will get the blame in public opinion for a decision that was taken by the governments.
None of this is of course the fault of the Swedish presidency. On the contrary, the acceleration of the enlargement negotiations should help in that respect. But it is something that all Member States, and all of us, should bear in mind as we move to the Convention to prepare the next Intergovernmental Conference. I hope that it will be a proper Convention, and that the next Intergovernmental Conference is not prepared by the usual small group of foreign policy advisers, but by a wider representative body."@en1
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