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Notiziario Marketpress di
Mercoledì 15 Dicembre 2004
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Pagina1 |
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JOSÉ MANUEL BARROSO PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION OBJECTIFS STRATÉGIQUES |
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Strasbourg, 14 December 2004 - “Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not intend to present today, before listening to you, a detailed account of our “work in progress”. But I would already like to outline the main elements of our approach. To connect the Union with its citizens, we must earn the confidence of the Europeans every day, by providing answers to their concerns. Their main worries regard the economic and employment situation. There is no freedom, no future, if you are not able to earn a decent living and to secure the future of your children. We need a strong, stable and dynamic economy to generate more jobs and more opportunity. The main question is “how ?” We do not need another library of comprehensive studies to answer that question. The work has already been done. The Lisbon strategy is both a diagnostic and a list of tasks to perform. As I said in this house in July and November, I intend to make it a top priority of the action of the Commission. A knowledge-based economy will be at the core of such a strategy. For the time being, it may look too much as a catalogue of worthy aims. The Commission wants to reshape it and transform it into a road map for prosperity, identifying clear objectives and a demanding calendar. This must be done with the Members States – who share the responsibility of the implementation – and in a constructive dialogue with the social partners. Economic growth is not an end in itself. The Europeans are concerned about the sustainability of our social model, our solidarity mechanisms, and health and pension systems. They care about the quality of life and their environment. The only way of securing these goods is to generate the necessary resources to that end and, therefore, to secure economic growth. Otherwise, these will remain only unaffordable luxuries for some of our citizens. The Europeans are also concerned about their personal security. Crime is not limited to the boundaries of our Member States. Terrorism is the ugly face of globalisation. We need safer streets and a safer continent. The Commission will actively promote initiatives to provide our citizens with a better level of personal security and therefore of personal freedom. What are our means? We must back our ambition with the necessary financial resources at a European and national level. We will not be a true Union without a vigorous cohesion policy. We must complete the Internal Market based on clear and simpler regulations. We need a better regulation and have to be ready to roll back unnecessary red-tape. We can do this by supporting our strategic objectives with a new way of working inspired by the Constitution. All this must amount to a positive agenda for reform. All this will not be achieved in a vacuum. The Union is not an isolated entity, a fortress. A number of states want to joint our Union. We should prepare ourselves to welcome them in the same way as they make efforts to meet our demanding standards. We also have neighbours and we need to structure better our relationship with them, to tackle common problems and promote stability. We have partners in the entire world to which we are united by strong cultural and economic ties. Europe cannot be egoistic. We have a duty of solidarity with the poorest regions of the world, particularly Africa. Our values of democracy, freedom, respect for Human rights, impose on us the responsibility of promoting them worldwide. Only by strengthening our values we will be able to defend our interests in the world”
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