Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-20-Speech-3-394"
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"en.20080220.17.3-394"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the effects of demographic change are very varied. While the outskirts of Paris are shaken time and time again by social unrest owing to the high rate of migration, in Brandenburg, where I come from, the regions are dwindling, people are moving away and the population is aging much more rapidly.
The ageing society places a burden on public budgets, with social benefits to be paid, and the Lisbon Strategy has undertaken to reduce these. However, in light of the real causes of demographic change, I wonder whether this reduction might not be counterproductive for the Lisbon Strategy. The Commission is making it fairly easy to blame women for the ageing of society, because they are not having enough children, but the real reasons are current and past political errors.
I would like to address just three of the points that have brought this imbalance in society into being. The first point is that analyses show that people do in fact want to have children, but parents – not just women – do not have children because the framework conditions are not right, because they do not have any social security, because – as has already been said – it is more difficult for parents to find employment and because career and family cannot be combined.
The solution to this would be a totally new paradigm in relation to work-life balance. The key would be to divide time for family and career equally between the sexes; the Dublin Foundation has carried out some excellent research on this. It is also vital that children are not seen as little tickets to poverty, as is the case in many Member States.
For policies of the Member States, what this means is sustainability in the social security system and, although this is an unpopular cost factor, it would put demographic change back on an even keel.
An interesting study carried out in the region that I come from illustrates the second aspect. In this study, it was established that young women were moving out of the area not because of the problems of combining work and family, but because of massive discrimination that started as soon as they left school. They are top people, the best in the class, the top graduates, yet they are still offered places on the lower-quality training courses and poorer opportunities to advance their careers. This means, then, that the European Commission can really be effective in the area where it really has competence, that is, in matters of gender mainstreaming – equal opportunities for men and women – to combat discrimination by introducing improvements to legislation and particularly by exerting pressure on Member States to implement legislation so that things finally get moving.
Thirdly, as draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Regional Development, I would like to come back to the topic of the declining regions. In our opinion, we are critical of the way in which the state administrations are still erecting huge barriers to effective involvement by citizens and to the development of innovation and creativity. By doing this, they are hindering plans for successful regional development.
At the same time, there is a tendency for political leaders to simply write off regions, to withdraw from them claiming that the state has a responsibility to provide basic needs, to simply give up on them. This is no solution for Europe because over the long term, over generations – as history shows – it will become incredibly expensive. In reality, it is the task of the state administrations to pick up on the impetus provided by civil society and cooperate with it to pull the regions out of this dilemma.
In this connection, I call on the European Commission to pick up on input from civil society especially, to promote civil society by coordinating the exchange of experience between regions where things are going well and highlighting good examples of tried and tested practice. These are concrete solutions in which the European Commission can be active without always holding women responsible for demographic change."@en1
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