Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-29-Speech-3-021"
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"en.20061129.9.3-021"2
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".
Mr President, as Commissioner Wallström’s research – presented to one of our committees last week – has revealed, there is at least as much a communication crisis in the European Union as a constitutional crisis. We risk slowly but inexorably losing the confidence and trust of our citizens by our collective failure to respond to their concerns and our inability to frame a coherent and acceptable response.
Those concerns are many and varied, but to my mind they hinge around responses to the challenges of the world in which we live. We witness rapid world population growth, even though it is declining here, and failure to share equitably the fruits of our endeavours or the benefits of modernity. As a result, many vote with their feet. We are creating a global economy without forging a comparable global social contract. We face a major challenge, as the Prime Minister mentioned, from internationally organised crime, with some criminal gangs now more powerful than some national governments. Yet the Union seems more geared to solving yesterday’s problems than today’s or tomorrow’s.
The tools to solve these problems are at our disposal in a common foreign and security policy and a justice and home affairs policy, but they lie unemployed. The irony is that the Constitution as it emerged from the Convention probably met most critics’ concerns. Unfortunately, Europe’s political class failed to explain this, for which we all share responsibility. We left the field open to the Constitution’s detractors and there is little sign yet that France will have a more serene or informed debate on its place in Europe in the run-up to next May’s elections, or that the Netherlands, emerging from elections last week, has really made up its mind. It would be too easy to conclude that the victory for the anti-European parties is confirmation that we got it wrong, but we need the Prime Ministers of those two countries to come here to explain to us how they see the way forward. In Poland there is denial, and from across the English Channel an eerie silence reflecting relief and embarrassment in near equal measure.
I hope the Germans can relaunch the debate. I applaud Angela Merkel’s determination to do this, but I suspect she will find it extremely difficult within the period of the German Presidency. This is where Ireland can play such an important part, Prime Minister, not only because of the role you played in the Convention, or your experience of adverse referendum, but because of Ireland’s role in looking for what you called a return to the balance and the substance of the constitutional treaty, and in working together with Portugal and Slovenia. Go out and build a coalition of smaller countries that know how important it is to respond to the challenges of globalisation. Go out and build a coalition of the political forces which, in response to the challenges of globalisation, recognise that we need to keep the drawbridge down rather than pull it up.
We have to show our citizens that the European Union can work on energy policy, on issues like mobile phone roaming charges, and in particular on justice and home affairs. We can do that with the existing Treaties by use of the
clause.
By any objective standards our Union is a great success. Therefore, think less about changes to the Constitution and more about building the collective courage to go out and persuade people why it is necessary."@en1
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