Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-07-Speech-4-054"
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"en.20070607.3.4-054"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members, having myself had a guest’s seat at this debate on a point of order, I must now presume on you to come back to the debate we were having beforehand, which had to do with the forthcoming Council. I would like to begin with a parallel that has frequently been drawn in this debate, that between the G8 Summit, which is currently going on in Heiligendamm, and the next European Council. There are, indeed, overlapping themes, and I shall address my remarks directly to Mr Markov, who has set himself up as the representative of all the critics who are currently demonstrating against the G8 summit or otherwise expressing their opposition to it. My personal view is that one either criticises G8 conferences for not being legitimated to take political decisions, or one criticises them for taking decisions that are insufficiently acute, clear and – where climate change is concerned – fall short of what is demanded. I have to tell Mr Markov that you cannot do both at once.
We now have a more limited and manageable space in which we have to seek a solution, and I hope that you will all help to win over your governments, who, as we all know, still take a rather sceptical view of this big project that we have planned for the end of the German Presidency of the Council. I thank you for this debate. Let us, during the European Council, work together to make it a success and without losing the confidence that all 27 European governments will be sufficiently aware of their shared responsibility.
I am not making a party political point when I say that we should all get together and consider very carefully what the political consequences would be if our criticism of political summits were to be unremitting. It is precisely those who have not, so to speak, lost their senses, who know that we, in a world that has become more problematic, need to do politics in dialogue, that should feel least obliged to criticise summit meetings of this kind, and anyone who is critical of the summit in Heiligendamm on the grounds that lively debates are going on there about climate change and because they fear that sort of controversy really has no business taking part in them. Where different interests are at stake, though, simply waiting to see what will happen will not produce the desired result; I would take as an example of this our own European debate on climate change, which went on until March this year, and in which there was no manifest likelihood of our coming up with an agreed outcome by March. The simple fact is that argument is sometimes necessary, and certainly gets things moving in the right direction; I hope that is the result that will emerge from Heiligendamm.
If I may now turn to the forthcoming European Council and to the work that is going to be done there on the great European reform project, I would like, in the first instance to thank all those who have taken part in the debate for their confidence in the German Presidency of the Council, although I am of course aware that this trust goes hand in hand with high expectations that we will bring about a resolution of the issues still outstanding in connection with the European Council and with the Constitution in the course of the next few weeks. The only promise I can give you is that our ambition to do so is undiminished, and that we will not only invest time in dialogue but will also try to make what we hope will be creative proposals for solutions where such are still needed. There are those who have said, here and today, that there is no alternative to success at the European Summit, and I have to say that I agree with them all.
There are those who have been critical of what they call a lack of openness to the public, but perhaps we should leave that debate to one side for a moment, for you all know better than I do that nothing is as public as a debate on European lawmaking, and you know that we need a unanimous resolution of the European Council as well as a debate in Parliament. Since there are no indications that one will not be forthcoming, it is in your interest too that we should prepare as well as possible for this council to be a success, and that calls for talks in which we will have to test and amend wordings that we do not yet know will carry weight, rejecting or withdrawing most of them for not yet providing us with a sustainable way to a solution.
When we meet together at the European Council, every proposal will of course be public, and I am very well aware that our Presidency will come in for criticism every time a new wording is proposed. If the Council as a whole endorses the proposals, then it will come in for criticism – as will the Commission to the extent that it has a hand in things. Since openness and criticism will not be in short supply at the Council, we should not, by unnecessary criticism, make the period of necessary work preceding it more burdensome.
I do believe that the process over recent weeks has enabled us to reduce the number of outstanding issues to a considerable degree, and that is a good sign."@en1
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"(The President called the Chamber to order.)"1
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