Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-22-Speech-3-255"
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"en.20031022.10.3-255"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like first of all to thank my colleague, Mrs Zrihen, for the excellent work she has done and, at the same time, to welcome the willingness of both the Council and the Commission to again consider industrial policy as one of the European Union’s major concerns. We should not forget that we are back here with the very foundations of European integration. It was the integration of the key industrial sectors of the time, coal and steel, that sealed our destiny as a Community. Since then, our industrial policy ambitions have, however, fallen short because only the commercial approach, that of competition and free trade, has prevailed, and I concede that this has brought benefits. One of the results, in the context of the far-reaching and inevitable industrial changes we are experiencing, has, however, been a complete failure to anticipate their effects, especially in terms of employment, and the waves of collective redundancies we are seeing everywhere in the Europe of the Fifteen bear witness to that, as has just been underlined. Tomorrow, it will affect the countries joining the European Union if we do not respond.
Our declared ambitions for growth, more and better jobs and social cohesion, to quote the Lisbon objectives, need us to define a new industrial policy for the Union. That is crucial both for employment and for the Union’s social and territorial cohesion. Both sides of industry are willing to participate in defining those objectives as part of a genuine action plan, as the report recommends.
I would like to stress two points on behalf of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, first of all the question of industrial competitiveness. This is central and cannot be reduced to cost cutting alone, as some seem to think. It is a composite idea that must take full account of the principles on which the European social model is based, namely all the social factors mentioned by Mrs Zrihen just now, and I am not going to repeat them. Those factors are quite different from objective costs. They are productive factors in their own right and must be given the same attention as the development of research and the application of new technologies.
The second point is the need to promote an integrated industrial policy: major European projects, the promotion of technology platforms, etc. must go hand in hand with territorial approaches in terms of territorial balance and consistency with employment policies, whether it be in the framework of the open coordination method or of more binding procedures, as Mr Langen seems to want.
Finally, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to say that the lack of an industrial policy and therefore of the benefits that might be expected from it, is one of the reasons why many of our European fellow citizens are increasingly losing confidence in our institutions, including this one, since we are supposed to represent them in their most legitimate interests, the first of which is employment."@en1
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