Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-07-Speech-3-041"
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Thank you very much, Madam President, and thank you very much to all the Members who have spoken during this debate.
There have undoubtedly been achievements, and we should not hide them.
For example, one achievement is that all of the excessive deficits in the euro area have been corrected. Today the Commission has also approved the abrogation of the excessive deficit procedure for Portugal and Italy. There are no countries in the euro area with a deficit above the limit laid down in the Treaty and by the Stability and Growth Pact.
Only a few years ago, when we debated the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact here, many of you could not imagine this, but the success of the Stability Pact and of the commitments made by the governments of the euro area Member States has resulted in there being no excessive deficits.
However, there are very important things to be done, and we need to do them. This is what this initiative is about: getting us moving again, and I will bring you a list of issues to debate in Parliament and in the Eurogroup, and I agree with those of you who have said that the work of the Eurogroup is incredibly important and that the work that it has been doing under the chairmanship of Jean-Claude Juncker is very positive. This needs to be debated in parliaments, with national public opinion and with the governments of the Member States, and we need to dialogue with the European Central Bank without fear, with respect and with satisfaction, given the way in which the European Central Bank exercises its independence. It is an incredibly effective bank even though it is an incredibly young bank in comparison with the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan or any other central bank.
Two final comments. Firstly, regarding the countries that are not and do not appear to want to be in the euro area. I am not referring to the candidate countries that will be in it in the coming years, provided that they fulfil the conditions, but to those who have decided either through an opt-out clause or through a referendum that they do not want to be part of it.
Some of you have said that the euro area will have problems in the future. I predict that it is those who do not want to be in the euro area that are going to have problems.
In the global economy, those who will suffer the consequences of being isolated are those who wish to be isolated. Those who integrate, those who are prepared to share and to decide their economic policy together will adopt the correct decisions, the right decisions, and will obtain the benefits of integration for their citizens.
I am very grateful to you for the comments you have made regarding the initiative and the work of the Commission that I have presented to you today and that we will undoubtedly continue to debate over the coming months.
The euro, Economic and Monetary Union – as many of you said in your speeches – is a dream that has become a reality, and this has happened in the space of 10 years.
I think that this is a reason to thank those who launched this initiative in the first few decades of European integration: Mr Werner in 1970, for the first report on Economic and Monetary Union; Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt in the 1970s and 1980s; of course Jacques Delors and all those who, along with him, worked to make the Maastricht Treaty and the idea of Economic and Monetary Union itself that we are developing a possibility.
There is reason to be pleased not just because we have made what they dreamed into a reality, but because this reality is giving us results that ordinary citizens can appreciate.
Some of you spoke about the results among citizens and in the real economy: what will be the understanding of people outside this Chamber? The public understand much more than some of us imagine that, thanks to the euro and thanks to European integration, there are now sixteen million more jobs in the euro area than there were ten years ago. Sixteen million more jobs. Much more employment created in the euro area than in the United States. Five times more employment created in the euro area since the euro has been in existence than in the decade prior to the existence of the euro.
The public understand this perfectly well. Citizens understand it perfectly well, just as they understand and are asking us, in the face of the current situation, with major challenges and with very tense and difficult situations in the markets and in the economic environment, not to remain inactive and to continue taking initiatives.
Now that we have instruments for economic integration, we need to use those instruments: those that are provided for in the Treaty, those that were set up ten years ago on the basis of what had been achieved and learning from our experience of how difficult it is to achieve some objectives.
We need better coordination of economic policies, not only budgetary policies. This is what we are talking about when we talk about the Lisbon Strategy; but in particular, when we talk about the euro area we need to talk about the specific needs of the euro area, both in terms of the coordination of budgetary policies and in terms of the coordination of structural reforms, the implementation of which is essential in order for the euro area to function properly and to achieve good results in terms of employment, growth, low price increases and greater opportunities for citizens, for those whom we represent."@en1
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