Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-14-Speech-3-068"
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"en.20060614.2.3-068"2
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"Mr President, I would like to make three points. The first point is that I think the speech made by Mr Barroso was excellent. Right now we are getting involved in this vicious circle of Euro-pessimism and what we need is a heavy-duty injection of Euro-optimism. We need to take a look at what we have achieved over the past 10 to 12 years and the results are overwhelming – everything from enlargement to justice and home affairs, CFSP, and, of course, the single currency. Sometimes we have a tendency to lose perspective. We must realise that the European Union is constant crisis management. We go from one little crisis to another, but I think the bigger picture is a success story.
The second point I want to make is that right now I think we are facing a new generation of what I call ‘EU whingers’ or ‘EU whiners’. They are people, usually ministers, who go into a closed room, have a discussion, clap each other on the back and say ‘great decision’. Five minutes after that, they get into the blame game, go in front of their national media and say, ‘oh no, what an awful decision the EU has just made’. You cannot talk negatively about the European Union six days a week and then go to church on Sunday and say that the EU is a great thing. Perhaps this could be the reason why the UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett does not want to see much transparency, because then people would see that some of the British positions are actually pro-European.
The final point I want to make is that we need a constitutional treaty. The problems are not going to go away and we have heard that in the debate today. We need the Charter of Fundamental Rights; we need a legal personality; we need a foreign minister; we need more qualified-majority voting and we need more codecision. So we need to fix it, and hopefully we can fix it before 2009. Deepening and widening go hand in hand. Nice is not enough."@en1
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