Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-11-Speech-3-266"
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"en.20050511.20.3-266"2
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"Mr President, I would like to congratulate you for looking rather enthusiastic, though I have my suspicions that you would much rather be eating asparagus with the rest of the House at this moment.
I have three general points. First of all, I think that this is probably the most important institutional question that we will face within the next four to five years. It is really about executive power: it is about who runs foreign policy – the Commission or the Council. I am very happy that the Member States have taken the issue forward. I am happy that they have provided five
for the Antici Group; I am happy that they have been dealt with in the Coreper meetings; and I am also happy that the Commission has had confessionals with the Member States. Most of all, I am happy that, in the European Parliament, we have brought the debate and the discussion out into the open.
The second point I wanted to make is that I think an external relations service for all of us will bring only benefits. In many ways, this whole issue has only winners. It is about providing us with better consular services; it is about providing us with better reporting; and, in general, it is about providing us with a better common and foreign security policy. Because, as we all know, without a functioning civil service on a European level, it cannot work.
The third point I wanted to make – and this is to reiterate what Mr Méndez de Vigo and Mr Brok said – is that there are two key issues that we are looking at from this side. The first is that, even though the system might be
it is very important that two things remain with the Commission: one is the budget and the second is general administration.
To finish off, I would like to say to the Commission that I hope they stay very firm to the end, because we have to avoid the counter-contamination of issues such as trade and development going over to the intergovernmental and Council side. Never underestimate the capacity of the Council Secretariat to pull the rug out from underneath the Commission – they will do it if they get a chance."@en1
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