Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-13-Speech-2-013"
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"en.20070213.3.2-013"2
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Mr President, former Presidents of this honourable House, ladies and gentlemen, it is in order to avoid the impression that we are at a European People’s Party congress that I, a social democrat, have now taken the floor, and what I am now putting myself through is a difficult exercise. You will be aware that I take the view that the speech of this House’s President must do justice to everyone in it – or at least approximate to doing so – and that it should not become the subject of partisan political debate, for that is the sort of speech to be delivered, not by the one who convenes all, but by one who puts forward an individual’s view for the purposes of debate.
Mr President, you can see that what I feared is coming to pass; this formal sitting could become a lively debate, but Mr Ferber’s CSU has so much of its own stuff to deal with that we will allow him an interruption.
Mrs Merkel, Mr Poettering, we must try to meet both demands. We must not only organise formal sittings characterised by high-flying rhetoric, but must also make things happen from day to day. That is what we are calling for. In every speech I have heard today, I have heard reference to the social Europe being the core and basis that holds our society together. Two and a half years ago, when I said that in my first speech as chairman of my group, what I got for it was mocking laughter from certain quarters in this House. Our having made that sort of progress in two and a half years, with all of us now agreed on it, gives me the hope that we will, by the end of your two and a half years in office – and that is how long you have said you will stay there – have moved on even further.
I should like to make just two brief closing comments. I do not, Mr President, share your view that it was the United States of America that defeated Communism or helped to overcome it in Eastern Europe; it was not the United States that did that, but the courageous men and women in Poland; it was they, the Hungarians, and the people in the Baltic States, who defeated Communism, not the Americans, and that, more than ever, needs to be said in this House, with gratitude to the Members from those countries, who represent the new democracies.
My last comment I shall address to you, Mr President, for, since you have turned your attention to the issues of our future, and delivered a speech that is, to my mind, one of the best in this House for many years, it is to you that I will say that I also have the confidence that you will put that into practice. As President of this institution, you will have a weighty task, particularly as regards the Constitutional Treaty, and if you can help to find common ground between the highly divergent views of the Heads of State or Government, in the same way as you managed, as chairman of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats) to hold the conflicting interests of that group together, then I am confident that your Presidency will be a good one.
I want to acknowledge, Mr President, that you have delivered a speech behind which the whole House can unite, one in which you have described the essential tasks that lie ahead of us, and that your term of office falls in a decisive period for European politics. There is no way of putting it other than to say that the reforms will either succeed or fail, and if they fail, if the Constitution does not come to pass, if we are thrown back onto the incomplete Treaty of Nice, then – as you brought out very well in your speech – it will be not only a Treaty that will have been brought low, but also an ideal.
In your speech, you gave a description of what the European ideal is, explaining that it is in cooperation between cultures that we find solutions, that religious intolerance is to be overcome by dialogue between religions, that it is on economic and social integration that peace and peaceful coexistence are founded, and that the surrendering of territorial claims can be accomplished through territorial integration. If we set this ideal against the challenges we face, then the nature of those challenges becomes clear; they are hatred between races and peoples, which we find everywhere throughout the world, religious intolerance, which is everywhere on the other side of our borders, and, alas indeed, renewed claims to power over territory. If you want peace throughout the world, with peace established within Europe and between it and its neighbours, you need more than ever the ideal of Europe to counteract such cause of warfare as hatred, intolerance, exclusion and oppression. To these things we respond with integration – both social and cultural – with solutions arrived at between religions and across ethnic divides, and these you described well; my group can do no other than give them its full support.
At the same time, though, we face the challenge – as you so rightly said – of dealing with day-to-day conflicts. People want more than just formal sittings, although I congratulate you on this one, for which we have all been preparing for a long time, and, however sceptical I might be, I will concede that it has gone well. It is not every day, though, that we assemble in formal session. The public want us to come up with solutions to day-to-day conflicts. When the echo of what is said in formal session has died away, everyday life wastes no time in catching us up. There are three things that people want from us: First, they want us to say what is what; secondly, they want us to come up with suggested solutions to it; and, thirdly, they want us to be decisive and to act – together in so far as that is possible, but, if it is not, to do so by a majority decision of the kind that is customary in a democracy. That, too, must be possible, and – by the way – in the Council as well.
Turning to you, Madam Federal Chancellor, before you tell us more about discontinuity, I have no objection to us discussing that, but the greatest generator of discontinuity is the Council over which you preside. That is the problem!
We are, of course, caught out by our own problems, the ones that we all have to address – us here in this House, you in the Council and the Commission with its own. On New Year’s Day this year, Mrs Merkel, the magazine ‘Cicero’ published a marvellous interview with you, which I read with a great deal of attention. One tremendous thing you said in it was this: ‘Another thing I aim to do in 2007 is to make more progress on dealing with climate change. […] With that in mind, I will be giving particular attention, within the international context, to environment issues’. And quite right too! You said the same thing today. Let me now quote what you said elsewhere, something that – if I remember correctly – you said in the German
to the effect that you would be vigorous in preventing a single threshold value for the emission of CO2 from new cars with effect from 2012.
the grim reality of everyday life has caught up with us again.
That, too, is indeed, discontinuity. We must …"@en1
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"(Interruption by Mr Cohn-Bendit: ‘Discontinuity!’)"1
"(Interruption by Mr Ferber)"1
"Voilà"1
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