Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-273"
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Mr President, I promised that during the first half of 2004 I would outline the future prospects for the European programmes for which I am responsible. It is done. The Commission has just given the green light for the communication about these new programmes.
Then there will be a second large integrated programme: ‘Making Citizenship Work’, which will combine several current programmes. These will continue as at present, under the umbrella of citizenship. It will cover three fields: youth, culture and media.
The first field is the Youth Programme. I know that some of you are more particularly interested in this programme, several aspects of which will be developed. The first aspect, the first strand, ‘Youth for Europe’, will combine mobility, participation and exchanges. Then the second major strand will be ‘European Voluntary Service’. By extending this service not only to individuals but also to groups, we would like to make voluntarism among youth a really strong and visible policy with the intention of extending it even beyond Europe. We want to make a kind of ‘Youth of the World’ programme, to contribute to the development of mutual understanding through an open-minded approach to the world and active engagement of young people. I am thinking of the countries of the enlarged Europe, of strengthening cooperation with the candidate countries, with the Balkan countries and the EFTA countries, and also with other third countries. Another aspect which must not be neglected is the action of socio-educational instructors and support systems for training youth workers, and support for political cooperation.
The second field is culture. There will be three objectives with European added value here: professional mobility, the transnational circulation of works of art and intercultural dialogue. These will be the three common themes running through all our cultural actions. There will be no more rigid sectoral divisions like there are today, but rather the major emphases I have just described, with the three types of action we already know today: multiannual cooperation with private operators and businesses – an opening to the field of cultural businesses; innovative annual projects, no change there; and going back to the problems we have just solved, support for European cultural bodies. Here, too, ladies and gentlemen, there will be much simplification. There will be just one budget line instead of the five we have today.
The final field is the audiovisual sector. Here, too, there will be three major objectives: the preservation and enhancement of cultural diversity and heritage, the circulation of works inside and outside the Union, and strengthening the competitiveness of the industrial sector. You must understand that we are retaining the present scheme of things. Even today we say that investment in film production is a national, regional, private investment, or whatever you wish to call it, but not European. We are not changing that, but we are going to give the Member States the possibility of continuing that investment and continuing public aid for the cinema. To do so, we are going to intervene up and down stream. Upstream by acquiring competences. Our cinema schools must be networked. One might (why not?) imagine an Erasmus for cinema schools. That would be a very good thing. To have access to credits, it will be necessary to learn the specific work of filmmaking, including business plans. We do not want to educate oddballs, we want to educate people capable of making good films which, moreover, will sell.
Downstream there is the problem of distribution. You know that European films do not travel well, despite all our efforts. There is always the problem that people will go and see a national film in the country where it is made, but then the difficulties start when it crosses the border. We must therefore do all that we can to change the situation, not only to expand the market for films, but also for reasons of cultural diversity which I do not need to explain. We are going to strengthen the system of support and of selective automatic distribution and we are going to add support for dubbing and subtitling, support for multilingualism, so that it will not be too expensive for films to travel. I am thinking of new technologies in this connection, because 40% of the income from a film is already generated by DVDs. DVDs already have the potential to be multilingual. We will therefore have to work on that with a lot of commitment.
Then there is the question of greater promotion, in Europe of course, but also outside Europe. I am thinking, for example, of packages of European films translated into different languages, that would be shown at a festival in New York or New Delhi, accompanied by the European stars to really make the most of it and for high visibility.
In order to prepare for the future, ladies and gentlemen, we are reserving a space for ‘pilot projects’, a space of flexibility, because there are bound to be big developments in new technologies. We must therefore be ready to accompany those developments as required.
Ladies and gentlemen, that in a few words is what has been decided today. It is of course a framework. It is a structure, but I think that structure shows that the Commission is taking very seriously Europe’s most precious asset, Europe’s greatest wealth: the citizens and their cultural diversity.
The two communications adopted today affect all Europeans, from their schooling to their lives as citizens. That is important because Europe is not only about economics, finance and commerce. Europe has a soul. Europe is men and women in their cultural diversity, which is our Union’s true wealth. The new programmes are trying to listen to them; they are designed to respond to their aspirations and help them to create a genuine European citizenship. Questions of education and citizenship will in fact be among the major issues of the coming decade. In a Union which is expected to have nearly 500 million people in 2007, strengthening the sense of cultural belonging and of being a citizen of a community of extraordinary diversity will necessarily require mobilising all the tools and programmes at our disposal. The programmes concerned by the communications adopted today will therefore form part of a new overall logic: building bridges between cultures and individuals.
Mr President, these programmes will be our future because their main thrust is to help young people to realise their European aspirations both in the field of education and in the vast field of citizenship. I know that these programmes come up to a lot of expectations. They have not been plucked out of thin air. There have been public consultations with thousands of professionals, with thousands of people involved in culture and education. We had the agreement and the express request of Parliament to go ahead. I can also tell you in all honesty that the timetable will be tight because we will need 2006 to put these programmes in place and ensure a smooth transition between today’s programmes and tomorrow’s.
I would also like to tell you that the Commission has taken advantage of this to propose a major simplification. That simplification does of course have its limits because the legal bases, the customers, if I may put it that way, and the interventions are different. We have, however, managed to reduce the number of legal bases from 13 to six and the number of budget lines from 26 to seven. A revision of the Financial Regulation is also planned in 2005 and I very much hope that, in the interests of greater transparency, greater efficiency and less bureaucracy, we shall succeed in particular in making these programmes easier for the citizens to use.
All these programmes are European programmes which emphasise European added value and were therefore created and conceived at European level. However, their implementation will be decentralised to national agencies closer to the citizens. Those agencies will be responsible for the practical implementation of the programmes because they will be directly familiar with the citizens concerned. I can tell you that there is a tremendous capacity for absorption in this respect because even today our budget execution is virtually 100%. The applications we are receiving for projects connected with education and culture in the broad sense are at least 50% more than we are able to grant. We really have capacity to fill because there is a very large public demand to be satisfied.
Why did I wait until today to present these new programmes to you? Quite simply because I had to wait for the financial perspectives in order to be able to move forward. As I believe President Prodi said in this Chamber, the Commission thinks that education and citizenship are very strong aspects of future European policy. That is why the financial perspectives have offered us a greatly expanded budget. However, even if that budget is four times greater than what we have today, it is still far from being enough, ladies and gentlemen, because at the moment our programmes still account for only 0.8% of the Community budget. Even if the expenditure in question is appreciably increased in the interests of citizenship and in those of the men and women of whom Europe consists, it will still be only a very tiny percentage of the Union’s overall budget, not to mention the fact that, as I can tell you very clearly, there is still a lot of political work, a lot of persuading, to be done if we are to have that tiny percentage.
I said there were two programmes. The first is about education and is called ‘The New Generation of Community Education and Training Programmes’; its common theme is life-long learning, which must start at a very early age, teaching children how to learn, and must continue until citizens leave working life. There will therefore be just one integrated programme, a programme whose aim will be to ensure that languages, new technologies and, very importantly, the dissemination of the results of our work, which are considered transversal elements, cover all aspects of education.
There will of course be different levels, as there are today: schooling, vocational education and training, higher education, adult education. European added value will be introduced at all these levels: mobility, of course, because it is up to us to stress mobility; partnerships between school classes, between organisations concerned with education; transnational projects, in which our educationalists will develop new programmes at the leading edge of progress. A few figures will illustrate what we propose. We want at least 10% of primary school pupils to benefit from real or virtual mobility projects: today’s figure is only 1.5% a year. We want a threefold increase in the number of Erasmus students: the present number is 120 000 students a year. We want the number of people benefiting from the Leonardo programme, which is concerned with vocational education and training, to rise from 45 000 a year today to at least 150 000. We want genuine mobility in adult education: the present figure is, I am almost ashamed to say, 2 000 people, and we would like to increase that to at least 50 000 people a year. I am speaking here of mobility within the European Union, because there is also, of course, the world outside the European Union. There are our new neighbours, whom we shall have to bring into our way of making Europe.
To this end, Mr President, we want to develop Tempus and make it into Tempus Plus, which will no longer concentrate solely on the university level, but will also provide aid tailored to the needs and capacities of each country, aid for all areas of education policy, including schooling and vocational education and training. Then there are our Jean Monnet Chairs. Today we have them in 50 countries. We think development at this level, too, is very important. Another aspect which will be of interest to the honourable Members who were speaking of finance only a few minutes ago, Mr President, is the integration of institutions like Bruges, Florence and Maastricht into our programmes so that the legal base is regulated once and for all. So much for the big new integrated Education programme."@en1
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