Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-049"
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"en.20001212.4.2-049"2
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"Mr President, Mr Chirac, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Chirac, our Group of the European People's Party and European Democrats has always received you here in the European Parliament with the greatest respect, open-mindedness and esteem. The same applies today because we value you as a person and because your office so demands. We appreciate the fact that you were here in July and have returned here today, but the esteem in which we hold both you as a person and your office does not absolve us from honesty and we have a duty to express our convictions loudly and clearly today in your presence.
And we have seen with great concern over recent weeks and months, that governments are taking ever greater recourse to intergovernmentalism and governmental cooperation and I can only hope that the spirit of Pierre Pflimlin, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet will be the spirit and vision which determine the future of Europe ...
... because we are firmly convinced that only a Europe of communities with strong European institutions can safeguard law, democracy, solidarity and peace for us on our continent.
Nice obviously had its good and bad points; unfortunately there were a great many bad points. However, our yardstick for Nice from the beginning was the European Union's ability to act. Commission President Prodi, whom we thank, together with Michel Barnier – because we have not forgotten, Mr President, that Mr Barnier is a member of the Commission on your recommendation and we do not only want to criticise – has pointed out that it is precisely in the fundamental areas that qualified majority voting has not been extended in the Council of Ministers. For the European Parliament, which was the winner in Amsterdam, there has been no increase in codecision by the European Parliament and this is one of the great failings of the Nice Summit.
I do not intend to comment further on the complexities of the decision-making process because Elmar Brok from our group will certainly do so directly. But we have not achieved greater transparency. We have hope for the future and we do also see the good side, such as your commitment to the foreign, security and defence policy and the increase in Commission posts. We take you at your word, President Chirac, and I was delighted to hear that you want to involve the European Parliament closely in the post-Nice process. We expect all the Member States of the European Union and their governments to configure a conference in which the European Parliament is involved and helps to set the agenda and the procedure. We take you at your word that this will happen and then we shall perhaps move together towards a brighter future.
We have heard many fine words. You rightly speak of transparency. Above all, we need transparency in the Council of Ministers and we are most concerned to see that even the secretary-general – Mr Solana is more of high representative than a secretary-general – is prevented by the Community procedure from performing his duties as secretary-general as he would perhaps like to do.
We were delighted to hear that the European Parliament will be fully involved in the post-Nice process. On this depends our final answer, whether we say yes or no to Nice. We want a post-Nice process in which the European Parliament is involved both in setting the agenda and in the decision-making process. If you secure this then we shall have the chance to work together in a spirit of trust. We shall have to keep a very critical eye on the Council over coming weeks and months in order to ascertain if it too is in a position to safeguard the transparency of which you spoke.
These will be our yardsticks and, like you, we hope to be able to do our job so that we, the European Union, with our values, are truly open to the people of central Europe, who suffered a long time under Communism and who now wish to join our Community. We must open the door, but decisions must be made so that the European Union is also in a position to enlarge.
You said at the end of the summit that the Nice Summit would go down in the history of Europe as a major summit. Unfortunately, our group cannot concur with that.
We witnessed an Intergovernmental Conference which dragged on for months, followed by a summit in Nice at which we felt, even as we watched on television, that the Heads of State and Government – and this is a perfectly human trait – had reached the end of their physical and mental resources. Allow me to cite an example: thank God, the awful proposal that Poland should have fewer votes than Spain, despite having the same population, was revised. What sort of impression would Poland have had, with its experience of national socialism and communism, had it not been treated on a par with Spain. Thank God this has been corrected.
Mr President, I mention this because proposals such as this arise in the maelstrom of a summit such as Nice but should never be repeated in the history of the European Union. We say today to the people of central Europe: you are welcome in our European Union and it was Alain Lamassoure's proposal, which then became our group's proposal, Parliament's proposal, the Commission's proposal – and thankfully you too have adopted it – that we ensure that the first central European countries are able to take part in the next European elections in 2004.
Unfortunately, we also witnessed the contrast between large and small countries over recent months – and this too should never be repeated, because it acts as an insidious poison in the European Union – with many large countries behaving most meanly and many small countries behaving most generously."@en1
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