Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-11-17-Speech-3-016"
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"en.20041117.3.3-016"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Council has been confronted with extremely serious challenges in the field of internal policy. These include security and economic growth. Essentially, the latter is conspicuous by its absence across Europe as a whole, in spite of the Lisbon strategy’s unusually ambitious provisions. This state of affairs is due firstly to the fact that we still have an extremely naïve belief in the power and force of regulation as an agent of change, in particular as far as the regulation of economic life is concerned. This naïve belief has led to Europe becoming completely defenceless on the global market, and to our citizens and entrepreneurs being overwhelmed with reams of legislation, legislation that is very frequently detrimental. The second reason for poor economic growth is that our societies are ageing extremely rapidly indeed. Ageing at the rate currently experienced in Europe would ruin even an economy that was at the height of its development, to say nothing of the European economy.
In view of the impending Council, it is worth touching on the harmonisation of legislation. There are some areas in which harmonisation could have positive effects, yet there are also areas in which harmonisation is nothing short of impossible. Such areas include family law, for the simple reason that radically different opinions on the family are held within Europe. The Buttiglione affair is an excellent example of this. It would be a serious error to think that it might be possible to use European law to ensure that homosexual relationships are legally recognised in countries that have not agreed to such an experiment.
Still with the Council meeting in mind, the Council is to be commended for taking an interest in Ukraine. It must be added that this interest has come too late, and indeed we must hope it has not come altogether too late. If this crisis had not arisen, the exceptionally passive policies adopted with regard to the East would presumably have remained in place. The crisis we are witnessing within the pro-Western and pro-European forces in Ukraine would presumably not have come about had our neighbourhood policy been more courageous in political terms, more generous in economic terms, and above all, more open to the accession of countries such as Ukraine to the EU."@en1
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