Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-09-15-Speech-3-129"
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"en.20040915.6.3-129"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, I warmly congratulate you. Those who do not treat the Stability and Growth Pact as a fetish have been waiting for this moment for a long time. A taboo has been broken; we can talk about the Stability and Growth Pact, and can even talk about reforming it. Commissioner, you really do have my warmest congratulations, because the Finance and Economy Ministers have said that they regard your communication as a good basis on which to work. It seems to me, then, that we have taken a major step forward. No doubt you have been aided by the French and German situations, and by the ruling of the Court of Justice, but the step has been taken, so let us make good use of it and of the space that it has opened up to us.
This is an opportunity to be seized, primarily to put things back in order, and so I cannot go along with Mr Radwan’s assessment. This is not a matter of ascertaining whether the Lisbon strategy has failed or whether the Pact needs to be saved. What is at issue is how we use the Pact to make the Lisbon strategy succeed, and, looking at it from that angle, it strikes me that we must and can make more of an effort to keep track of expenditure. By this I mean the expenditure that contributes to the implementation of the whole Lisbon strategy; I do not think of competitiveness as being the alpha and omega of the Lisbon strategy. The Lisbon strategy will succeed if it is founded upon a strategy aiming at full employment and sustainable development on the basis of research and knowledge.
Commissioner, I turn now to a point that you raise in your communication, but which appears to me to be no more than lightweight and needing more work to be done on it, namely the link between coordination and the Stability and Growth Pact. You know better than I do that this coordination exercise has been, up to now, a purely academic one. The thing that makes it possible for it to become a ground rule and to define the quality of policy, does not work. The result is that all we have is a Stability and Growth Pact that, like a balance sheet, enables us to observe how things happened, without being able to determine the dynamics of it or the collective choice.
That brings me to my last point, the only thing that involves this House: the issue of the democratic debate on your proposals, on the implementation and coordination of the Stability Pact. Here there is much to be done. You make reference to this House at one point in your communication, but it would appear that this is almost a formality and that, at the end of the day, debate is, in essence, reserved for a very select and very definitely closed club consisting of the euro group speaking through the Ecofin Council. This wall has to be broken down. The debate must break out of this enclosure, for if it does not, economic policies, which are, in the final analysis, a matter for the collective choice of societies for the good of their peoples, will not be placed in the public arena. If this House, and the committee I chair, can contribute to this, I think we will have done a good job of work together. I wish you good luck!"@en1
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