Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-05-Speech-2-174"
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"en.20060905.23.2-174"2
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". – Mr President, this own-initiative report, prepared jointly by myself and Mr Silva Peneda, with the essential support of our respective staffs, is a very important contribution to the ongoing debate about the future of Europe and the role that Europe’s social model can play in re-energising the unification of our continent.
There are no doubts these days that the creation of the European Union has been a very effective and successful peace process. What is not so readily acknowledged is that it has also been a successful prosperity process. In his book, ‘The European Dream’, Jeremy Rifkin comments on the remarkable recovery of European countries following the Second World War. The fact that Europe outstripped the United States in growth terms for half a century up to the mid-1990s, by developing and putting into place a remarkable social infrastructure which ensured that prosperity could be shared, was a remarkable achievement.
This success was not based on a dog-eat-dog approach, but on a social contract which ensured that working people would share in the wealth created, and their dependence on society generally would also benefit through the provision of universal public services.
We are now into a new period – an unprecedented revolution in technology, in the age structure of our population, and in the globalisation of capital, where there is a growing need to create a transnational democracy that is capable of effective governance of those new phenomena.
This report recognises that the challenges we face cannot be addressed by reheated dogmas, whether of the left or the right. That is not to say that there are no philosophical differences anymore, but it is to argue that these differences are being redefined by the objective conditions of the modern world we live in.
This report is a restatement that Europe’s core values of equality, solidarity, redistribution and anti-discrimination, care for the young, the old and the sick through universal public provision must be defended in the necessary reforms already under way; that our social model is not an obstacle to competitiveness and growth but is, in fact, a necessary ingredient if we are to deliver the kind of decent European society that our citizens clearly desire; and that the concept of ‘flexicurity’, pioneered by my colleague Mr Rasmussen in Denmark, can help facilitate reforms by preventing people from tumbling into poverty as a result and can, if properly tailored to each Member State’s needs, be an important tool in the process."@en1
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