Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-14-Speech-3-013"
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"en.20071114.2.3-013"2
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"Mr President, we have just heard the language of the past:
Mr Barroso, you have majority support in this House for your Commission’s approach to globalisation. But it is not a majority based on one political family. Indeed, it may even prise apart and refashion Europe’s political families.
Globalisation will increasingly shape our politics. Not globalisation in the rather narrow economic sense defined in this communication – although a stable euro and effective competition rules and market regulation are in all of our interests – but in its wider, more holistic sense, encompassing world population growth and migration; climate change and energy security; and internationally organised crime linked to terrorism.
Is that not the validation we need to ‘act on a continental scale’, as this document urges, to utilise our ‘critical mass’ to ‘enable Europeans to shape globalisation’, as the Commission’s communication demands?
If so, Mr Barroso, where are your policies? Your timetable? Your comprehensive approach? We were promised action: instead we are proffered a paper which is rich in rhetoric but rather poor in proposals. This cannot be the final word in Europe’s response to globalisation. I await your single market review, to see how you will drive growth and jobs in difficult terrain, and your legal migration policy, hoping it encompasses the concerns of the countries of origin.
My colleagues and I await urgent action on cutting energy use and fighting cross-border crime. We believe, too, that social health and economic vitality are both important. If we are creating a global market, we need a new global social contract, reconciling the competing demands of flexibility and fairness because, as Martin Luther King taught us, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’.
So the Union must bring together the Lisbon agenda with its focus on competitiveness, the Cardiff agenda with its focus on social rights, and the Gothenburg agenda with its focus on the environment.
The world needs a strong, united Union to counter injustice, conflict and poverty wherever they are found because we are one of the few players capable of tackling global issues and, if we do not take the lead, nobody will.
That means stopping the hypocrisy of trade tariffs and fashioning a fair deal for developing countries in Doha; clinching a contract on carbon emissions in Bali, using our collective influence to get America on board; and building an international approach to financial markets, focusing on regulatory cooperation, convergence of standards and equivalence of rules.
Resolving these challenges in fairness to everybody needs more, not less, globalisation. For we live in an interconnected world, a world that requires solidarity at global level as much as it requires solidarity between European citizens.
And we must look forward, with Victor Hugo, to the day when the only battlefields are those of markets open for business and the human spirit open for ideas.
Others know, often better than we, that we already live in a global society. India, China and Brazil have caught the wave of opportunity and they are riding it high, while too much of Europe fears the wave crashing over it.
When President Sarkozy addressed us yesterday, he spoke of ‘different possible futures for the Europe of tomorrow’, putting our policies for competition, energy and enlargement up for debate.
Mr Barroso’s expression during much of that speech told us more than all of his words this morning. If Europe sits on its hands because national leaders – citing citizens’ concerns – contest the EU’s agenda, we will miss the chance to shape globalisation in Europe’s collective interests.
It is not citizens we need to convince, it is Member States. Survey after survey has shown that most of our citizens see the European Union, not national government, as best placed to manage globalisation.
Look how the earthquake of globalisation is shaking Europe’s body politic. Some on the right are retreating, in the face of global challenges, from Conservatism into nationalism, or from Christian democracy into Christian autocracy. The fissure of globalisation runs right through the EPP.
On the left, Kurt Beck and his friends are holding back much needed reforms. Franz Müntefering saw that and that is why he has voted with his feet. And yet the visionaries see the need for reform and they have written it into the new European Socialist manifesto, adopted appropriately in Oporto.
The division in our politics is no longer between left and right over economic policy but between those who respond to global challenges by pulling up the drawbridge and those who – with Liberal Democrats – advocate the open society."@en1
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"Die Rede der Vergangenheit!"1
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