Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-22-Speech-3-034"
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"en.20050622.13.3-034"2
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"Madam President, the outcome of the European Council does not come as a shocking surprise, for after the ‘cold shower’ of the French and Dutch referenda we could not have expected that everything would turn out as the Presidency had envisaged. It proved to be the case that the enlargement of the European Union and its possible socio-economic threats – immigration, wherever it may come from, economic liberalisation, whoever may have demanded it, played a significant part in forming a negative attitude. That is how the citizens of the European Union perceived it.
With reference, however, to what has been said and taking into account also other negative attitudes towards the European Union revealed in opinion surveys, undoubtedly the greatest responsibility lies with the politicians of the Member States. Too much is demanded of the European Union and Member States have been prepared to invest too little in order for the European Union to go from success to success. Politicians from the Member States have been eager to nationalise and attribute to themselves too many of the European Union’s true achievements, and to attribute to Europe their own domestic political failures. Too often, when taking difficult domestic political decisions, politicians from the Member States do not forget to justify them by reference to European Union requirements. It seems that we have overspent our credit. There exist two visions of the European Union’s future – one of a political European Union and one of a European Union of high-level economic cooperation. In truth, these two visions are two sides of the same coin – without economic and also social integration it will not be possible to build a sustainable edifice of political integration.
That, to my mind, is the clearest lesson of the last two referenda. We have to create the socio-economic preconditions for the citizens of the European Union to be able to assess and understand why political integration is necessary, why we, for example, wish to call the European Treaty a Constitution. Can we really consider the Council meeting to be a long-term failure? It approved the Lisbon Strategy, a strategy that means a lot more than integration of the internal market. The Lisbon Strategy is the model for cooperation in the European Union which, when applied to its fullest extent, would help to organise in the European Union the ambitions of our economic and social policy, a direction for Europe to grow as united and competitive, and in the medium term to regain the confidence of society. The Lisbon agenda, which has been a blatant example of the European Union’s indecisiveness in the past five years, must become an example of success and cooperation in the future.
That, however, can only be implemented if we can overcome the attitude towards cooperation in the European Union that we have exhibited until now. It is enough to recall the current unproductive debates on the Services Directive, which is a cornerstone of the Lisbon Strategy. The concluding words of the agreement on the Lisbon Strategy have demonstrated that the Council has partners who are engaged in the future of the European Union, and who will be able to find a basis for important tasks – security and cooperation, the enlargement of the European Union and cohesion policy."@en1
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