Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-16-Speech-2-038"
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"en.20031216.1.2-038"2
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"Mr President, it would be wrong to say of the Intergovernmental Conference held in recent weeks that it was a failure. On the contrary, under the Italian Presidency we were able to keep the basic ideas of the Convention virtually intact and agree jointly on 22 of the areas involved. Consensus was reached on an important issue relating to future security: the development of common European basic defence structures. When the IGC realised it should include the Convention’s original wording regarding the relation between the position of the non-aligned countries and security guarantees, Finland, Sweden and Austria were also able to become fully involved in security cooperation.
A by-product of the summit was the way it also resolved disputes over where to locate EU agencies, wrangles that had long been a source of irritation. Italy can therefore go away happy to brag about Parma ham and prosciutto and we Finns on the other hand will monitor the situation from the Chemicals Agency and ensure that they do not use the wrong ingredients when they produce them.
The argument over how the voting rights of the countries in the Council should be allocated left everything that had already been agreed open. As President Chirac himself admitted, the failure of the Nice Summit was the reason for this. We cannot be biased and point an accusing finger at the country currently holding the presidency nor even at Poland or Spain. It is natural that Germany was unable to accept the Nice decision. It is just as natural, however, that it cannot dictate the solution; instead, we are now to have talks aimed at a balance, talks which take a balanced view of the status of small countries, and not just the large ones like Spain and Poland. A return to genuine double majority voting – half in respect of the population and half in respect of the countries – must certainly be one aspect of the solution which would also reassure the small countries that they are not going to be dictated to by the large countries in the future. It is important, however, that debates on matters that have already been agreed on are not reopened on account of a row that has not been settled. If that happened we could really say that the Brussels Summit and the IGC have failed."@en1
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