Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-15-Speech-3-405-000"
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"Mr President, it is a great honour for me and for the Italian Government to have been invited to the European Parliament to address this plenary session.
We are determined to achieve this budgetary consolidation quickly, as we are determined, with the unusual arrangement that we have in government and in relations with Parliament right now in Italy, to undertake very quickly the structural reforms required.
Of course Italy, as it gradually shores up its position – and the road ahead is still long but I am very encouraged by what is happening – is a country that will not limit itself to passively transposing the policy guidelines of the European Union, but a country that will contribute increasingly to establishing these guidelines and playing the role that is naturally incumbent on one of the great founding nations of the European Union and one of the biggest economies in the euro area.
It is in this spirit that I was pleased to accept the invitation sent to Italy by the German Chancellor and the President of the French Republic to work closely together and I have always made it clear to them, ever since our first triangular meeting, that the contribution that Italy intends to bring to the table is a contribution focusing on EU methods, which recognises the precedence of the European institutions and which intends to make the most of every opportunity to build bridges instead of walls with those countries that are not yet in the euro and with those that have indicated that they wish never to be part of the euro area. I believe it is important for the EU to be inclusive, rather than to exclude.
Mr President, given this session’s specific topic ‘Economic crisis, growth and employment’, allow me to dedicate a few moments to what I consider the primary risk at this stage of European life. The euro has so far been the boldest move in building the community: we simply cannot allow it to become a factor for disintegration and separation among Europeans. This risk exists, and the solution to the euro area crisis is also close at hand – I believe it is so and we are committed to it. I believe, however, that we need to focus just as much effort on regaining a united spirit, a sense of belonging to a single project. The euro area crisis has given rise to too much resentment, has recreated too many stereotypes, has split Europeans on the basis of latitude, has split Europeans into core states and peripheral states. All these classifications should be rejected decisively.
I am the representative of a State considered to be geographically peripheral and I have nothing to object to this geographical connotation; at the same time, I have to point out that the core States – in which Italy was included from the standpoint of responsibility, if you will – starting with the two largest euro area economies, Germany and France, were at the origin of the Stability and Growth Pact crisis and its limited credibility in 2003 when, with the complicity of Italy which presided over the ECOFIN Council at the time, these two countries preferred to bring their political influence to bear over the other Member States to essentially break the mechanism for enforcement and for the application of rules.
This is a fact that is now recognised both by the leaders of Germany and of France, so I am not slighting my colleagues, the German Chancellor and the President of the French Republic. However, it is a fact that budgetary credibility was seriously undermined from within the core of the euro area, which, from a historical perspective, had the great merit of setting up and encouraging that budgetary discipline. We cannot therefore forget that there are responsibilities both in the core, and in the peripheral areas, because it is true that several states in the periphery, at some point – including the one which I am representing here
have let things slide too far along the road towards budgetary indiscipline. However, there is no such thing in the European Union, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as heroes and villains. We all need to feel jointly responsible both for the things that were done in the past and, most importantly, in building the future.
I would like to start by paying tribute to the European Parliament. It really is a moving experience for me to be here in this place. I remember the first meeting I had with the European Parliament in January 1995, for the hearings to confirm my appointment as a member of the European Commission. For the next ten years, Parliament was a decisive point of contact for me, and I watched the influence of democratic life in Europe grow in this Chamber, in the Brussels Chamber and in the Chambers of the Commission. I have always found that, for the Commission that I was a member of – and I greet the representatives of the Commission – Parliament was a key ally in driving forward the European project.
In essence, it has taken us eight long hard years, in which the Member States, the Commission – primarily the Commission, I am pleased to recognise that and emphasise that great institution that is the driving force behind European integration – and Parliament – which has played an ever greater role in recent years – these institutions have spent eight tough years rebuilding credibility in the Stability and Growth Pact; and I want to pay tribute to the role that Parliament has had, in particular with the ‘six–pack’, a construct which has introduced even greater credibility in discipline than the Council had originally put in place. Therefore, when we think that Parliaments are, in reality at this historical juncture, factors of indiscipline vis-à-vis the Executives – which is true sometimes at national level, but I am pleased today to acknowledge that it is not true at European level – well, this Parliament, thanks to its work, has become a factor of discipline.
Now I do not think this is the time to put aside budgetary discipline, just because we are pleased to have the fiscal compact and want to turn to another page on the European agenda, the one marked growth. I believe we have to reconcile both these aspects. This holds true even in daily life within our countries. Yesterday, for example, with my colleagues in the Cabinet in Rome, I had to take the difficult and unpopular decision to refuse a financial guarantee from the Italian State for a magnificent project to bring the 2020 Olympics to Rome. There was much disappointment in Italy over this decision, in Rome first and foremost. However, we argued – and I have the impression that the Italian public has understood – that the imperative for Italy today lies elsewhere, in our own interest and in that of Europe – and, by the way, last week in the United States, in Washington, I was able to witness with my own eyes just how much euro area stability is considered to be an essential component for the world economy. Therefore, at this juncture, any gesture we make which might defer sums which we cannot currently quantify to any degree of certainty would not appear to be in line with the responsibility that we as a government must take – even though, all too often, this has been avoided in the past in all countries – which is to avoid passing on debts to the future and to future generations.
I therefore hope that there will be other opportunities for great events in Italy, as has happened many times before, when Italy was able to make a contribution to culture, sports and European events. I believe, however, that this is the type of evidence we have to offer to show that budgetary discipline is not a recent acquisition that we want to set aside as soon as we can, but that it is a new way of experiencing public life.
In the European Council, Mr President, Italy is focusing increasingly on growth, particularly because we have a clear conscience given that within our borders, we are doing everything that is needed for budgetary discipline. In any case, the European Council meeting of 30 January, which will be followed by one on 1 March, has a lot to say and even more to do with regard to growth. I know how much this Parliament interprets the growth imperative in its daily work, in its great motions, and in its detailed decisions on individual projects.
Italy has successfully sought, for example, within the European Council, to give greater priority than in the recent past to growth as one of the objectives of economic policy. This is perfectly feasible without casting doubt over budgetary discipline: we simply need to leave certain clichés behind us. For example, the single market – the first brick in European integration – still has much to say and much to contribute to European economic growth. Commissioner Barnier has been the driving force in the Commission’s latest initiative, the Single Market Act, which, in itself, contains immense growth potential. In the European Council, Italy is fighting to ensure that words are followed by deeds, stepping up the pace and in such a way that Member State leaders put themselves personally on the line and give this the highest political importance, to prevent the single market from looking like a grey mass of unending directives and regulations. The single market is the body and, in some ways, the soul of European integration, and we have asked for considerable backing to be given to its development.
Another example – and here I repeat something I said in the European Council: the fiscal compact is great, it is great that the armoury at our disposal for budgetary discipline has been strengthened for the fourth or fifth time, but should we not be doing the same job, at least in part, to discipline the economic integration of the single market?
Now I find myself on a bench in Parliament which I never had the opportunity to sit on, here in the Council area, and it is a new experience for me to be responsible for the policy of a Member State. I can assure you that for me, the responsibility I feel towards my country and the responsibility I feel as an Italian towards the European Union are one and the same thing.
Why should we have, as it is right that we have, serious and incisive mechanisms with penalties for fiscal discipline, while a Member State that breaches the rules of the single market may persist in the breach for four to five years, until the Commission gets through all of the stages of the procedure and finally gets to the Court of Justice? These limitations on European integration are responsible for, among other things, the malfunctioning of the euro area itself as an optimal currency area. It is great to have focused so much on monetary union and the budgetary discipline that must accompany it; it is terrible not to have focused so much on economic union, which is the pillar on which monetary union stands. Now is the time for all of us to get together to focus more on this.
As regards growth – and, Mr President, I am going to conclude because I know that in this Parliament, time is rightly rationed much more than in any other place of public discussion in Europe, another contribution that you make to discipline, Mr President – stability bonds, on which this Parliament voted by an overwhelming majority, are a tool that I have encouraged elsewhere without ever seeing them as a possible source of fiscal indiscipline. They are a tool to ensure greater integration of financial markets which, if properly constructed along the lines of the Commission’s Green Paper and the report adopted today by the European Parliament, may in fact help to make the actions of the financial markets into a disciplining factor for public budgets. It is just one example of tools that can be implemented, while respecting the various sensitivities: if a major country believes that stability bonds should come a little bit later rather than earlier, again, this sensitivity should be respected, as long as no one claims that exploring them is dangerous. I believe that one day, the time will come – but not for a while – to reconsider whether the way we currently treat the act of private investment, but also of public investment, is today as appropriate as it could be.
I am happy that in our constitutions now, following the fiscal compact, we are introducing the rule of a structurally correct balanced budget; I am a little less happy that we have called it the ‘golden rule’. This is an important discipline but once, even in the German economic culture, the golden rule stated that there could be state debt but only to the limit of public investment; so we can finance with debt what is essentially the formation of capital.
One day, once we have completed the great transformation which – thanks especially to Germany – we have made in recent years towards a culture of discipline, Europe will be able to afford, without avoiding the issue or watering it down, to look more coolly and calmly even at tools for growth such as these.
The final point, Mr President, which I have little time to develop: I beg to refer to an article published this morning in the French, Italian and German press, and which bears my signature along with that of Ms Sylvie Goulard. We need to reconcile – and for now we are not managing to do this so well – integration, which we need in ever increasing doses, and democracy, which we certainly do not wish to give up. How do you reconcile democracy and integration? Well ...
I think it is certainly possible to reconcile democracy and integration.
Of course, only a deeply superficial, insular culture...
... might naively believe that integration means a super-state.
A vast majority in the Italian Parliament.
Mr President, please forgive me if I am overtaken by my passion for European integration, which does not mean a superstate at all, but rather a continuous operation of the principle of subsidiarity and needs to be reconciled with democracy. It is clearly evident in the last few days what might happen if citizens, in certain Member States, get the impression that integration occurs to the detriment of democracy.
Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, as we say in Italian, I believe that we need to work on the existing institutions. There is in Europe – I believe you have heard of it – an institution directly elected through universal suffrage by citizens, known as the European Parliament. This institution has a major impact on EU life: I was a member of a European Commission that this Parliament sent packing a number of years ago. I can assure you that scrutiny is alive and well in the European Parliament!
In any case, I think that, by continuing to develop the functions of the European Parliament, and with the full backing of the Commission, we can better reconcile the efficacy of a body such as the Council – which, while being fully EU-based, is also a direct expression of governments – with that of the other organs invented by the mind of that extraordinary Frenchman, Jean Monnet, so that, as they should, integration and democracy may be increasingly in tune with each other.
All too often, from Brussels, as a Commissioner, I saw national governments pointing the finger at European institutions after they had participated in decisions taken by European institutions. Well, I promised myself never to play such a dirty trick on the European Union …
… and I always explain to my fellow citizens, in Parliament and elsewhere, that the important sacrifices and difficult reforms which Italian citizens have been called upon to carry out at this time are not imposed by Europe: they are needed to improve Italian economic, social and civil life and, above all, in the interests of our children. It is also something that Europe has been asking us to do and has recommended, but it should not be blamed on the European Union.
I very much feel the responsibility of being at the helm of a country at the moment that has a raw material that is increasingly rare within the European Union, that is to say, public opinion in favour of European integration and construction. I feel the duty not to waste this, but rather to cultivate this raw material. Therefore, I feel I have to proceed with caution with the need to persuade citizens, but using substantive arguments, and not only – and not so much – on the basis of conditions imposed by Europe. Whenever I can, I call upon Heads of Government of other Member States to take the same careful approach to this key shared project of ours.
Italy at this juncture, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, is engaged in a complex exit strategy in order to emerge from the crisis. I think we are gradually managing to get our country out of the shadow zone into which it fell for a short time, a potential source of problems, of contagion, a breeding ground of disease for the euro area. We are making every effort in terms of budgetary consolidation and in terms of structural reforms. I want to remind you of the commitment made last summer by my predecessor, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, to balance the Italian state budget as early as 2013, in other words, a couple of years before other EU Member States – a commitment that was made in the midst of an emergency – has been maintained by my government, which has not asked to change it, even though it is extremely tough: it is a commitment that will require a primary surplus of about five per cent of gross domestic product, net of interest payments."@en1
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