Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament Dear colleagues, It is an honour and a great pleasure for me to be with you here in Ljubljana. I should like to express my sincerest thanks to you Mr Veber, as President of the National Assembly, for your invitation to address this House and I look forward to the subsequent debate with you all. We are currently witnessing extremely troubled times in Ukraine and the escalating crisis in the Crimea is giving very real cause for concern. I hope that we will succeed in averting armed conflict and preventing a division of the country and that we will be able to engineer a dialogue between the two sides. After all, while people are talking to each other they are not shooting at each other. Be that as it may, there is one abiding image from the last few months that will remain indelibly etched in my memory, an image which made a great impression on me and left me deeply moved: the image of the EU colours borne aloft in Maidan Square, proclaiming our common values rooted in democracy, the rule of law and freedom, proclaiming our peaceful coexistence achieved by implacable enemies holding out their hands to each other, first in reconciliation and then in friendship, pulling down walls and opening borders, by peoples shaking off dictatorships and forging democracies. For the people in Maidan Square, our colours represent the hope of a better future. I was all the more moved by these images, having spoken to so many who simply take the EU for granted as a guarantor of peace, giving us the opportunity to travel, work and live in a Europe without borders, something now regarded as a matter of course. All too often the EU is perceived as nothing more than a meddlesome bureaucracy obsessed with regulating every aspect of our lives. Of course I can understand how people grow frustrated with policies that fail to resolve their problems and become indignant when financial sector profits are privatised, while the taxpayer is left to underwrite its losses. I would like us to work together to improve the EU so that Europe can once again be seen as offering the promise of a better future for all. After all, that is the purpose of politics: to improve people’s lives. If we are to succeed in this, if our children are to have a decent future in the 21st century, the European Union is necessary, now more than ever. Allow me to share a few predictions with you. – in 2050 Europeans will make up just 5.4 % of the world population; – in 2050 neither Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom nor any other EU Member States will any longer be a member of the G7; – in 2050 the world economy will in all likelihood be dominated by the Big Three, that is to say China, the USA and India. These figures must give us pause for thought. The world is changing. The 21st century will be the century of world regions. The current Chinese Head of State, Xi Jinping, once put it to me this way: We, the Chinese, numbering 1.3 billion, are a world region, our Indian neighbours, numbering 1.1 billion, are also a world region. The USA is a world region. Latin America, with the emerging countries of Brazil and Mexico, is a world region. The South East Asian countries, the ASEAN, are a world region too. That is the way the world is going, said Xi Jinping. What about you Europeans? Are you a world region? That is indeed the question facing us as Europeans: What role do we wish to play in the 21st century? Do we wish to ensure that our interests prevail and help steer globalisation along a course converging with our own values? Do we wish to protect our democratic and social model? How do we wish to rise to the new challenges of climate change, international terrorism or migration flows? Left to their own devices, all of the European countries, including my own, rapidly come up against their own limits when it comes to acting effectively. If we Europeans peel off into our component parts, labouring under the fond illusion that, now of all times, the finest hour of the nation state has arrived, we should make no mistake about the consequences. We will be left to drift insignificantly into the backwaters of the world political scene. However, 507 million citizens, 28 nation states and the largest and wealthiest internal market in the world put us well and truly into the heavyweight category. It is my conviction therefore that united we stand victorious but divided we fall. Let me give you three specific examples of the benefits of pooling our sovereignty at European level. Firstly, with regard to trade agreements: if each individual European country climbs into the negotiating ring with the USA, China, India or Brazil, we will find ourselves hopelessly outclassed. However if we square up together as the world’s largest trading bloc, we can ensure that our economic interests prevail, protect our workers’ rights and uphold our consumer protection and environmental standards in the interests of our citizens. With regard to foreign policy as well we need to make more of an effort to pull together and jointly defend our values and interests. The Ukraine crisis is now escalating massively and, to be quite frank, the EU is making heavy weather of finding the right approach to Russia. We simply do not have any clear strategy on Russia. My hope is that we will be able to pool the resources and energies of the individual EU Member States to much greater effect than before with regard to foreign policy. Each Member State has its own specific national experiences, interests and areas of expertise to contribute and all must be put to the service of the EU as a whole. Naturally there is a danger of European policies being derailed by the vested interests of individual countries. For that reason, national idiosyncrasies, likes and dislikes must not be allowed to stand in the way of relations with key partner countries. While fully aware of the dangers, I therefore remain convinced of the enormous benefits to be derived from a modular approach to foreign policy. The EU is the only power in the world capable of conducting a regionally specific foreign policy with the benefit of historic links which continue to operate, for example the close-knit relations between Spain and Portugal on the one hand and the Latin American countries on the other, effectively forming one big family. And now allow me to say a few worlds about a truly historic project: the Banking Union. Even Slovenia, a model Member State and the first country, following accession in 2004, to fulfil the stability criteria for adoption of the euro, has had some very painful experiences of banking crises and bailouts. You have seen for yourselves the extent to which the economy can be contaminated by non-performing loans and bank debt and the importance of bank rescue measures if public confidence in policy makers is to be maintained. The introduction of the Banking Union is intended to avoid such crises in future by securing the banks and thereby ensuring that the public is never again left to foot the bill if they go to the wall.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 11:43:04 +0000
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