31 January 2014

VP Rehn: Keynote speech at the Committee of the Regions

It is essential to maintain the momentum of economic reform, to continue to lift competitiveness and boost private and public investment, and pursue consistent efforts to ensure the sustainability of public finances. That's the way we will win the most important battle of all, the battle to create more jobs for Europeans.

The Cassandras or doomsday prophets have been proven wrong, but we cannot claim victory yet. The recovery is still fragile. We need to do all it takes to restart the engine of growth and jobs. In other words, we have to do everything we can to tap Europe’s growth potential, to create the jobs that especially our young people need.

Europe needs to be big in big things and small in small things. Yes, we needed reinforced economic governance to ensure macro-economic stability. But equally, we need to unleash the entrepreneurial drive and competitive innovation by the single market and better regulation.

We must also work hard to reinforce Europe's global role in line with our democratic values. Let's be honest - the economic crisis has turned Europe more inwards than outwards. The crisis has consumed the political energy necessary for deploying our power of transformation in our neighborhood and our input to global security.

This brings me to the nature and role of the EU in global governance. I believe that the political scientist Ralph Miliband saw it very clearly almost half a century ago in his book in his book "The State in Capitalist Society", where he spoke of the then EEC as a bridge between a compartmentalised political system of nation-states and an interdependent and integrating world economy. So he recognised that the world economy was going to be deeply integrated, while states as governance structures were lagging behind.

The European Union is an answer to that challenge. It is the bridge between these two levels of governance. Choices that have a direct impact on the future of European citizens are increasingly taken at local, regional and global levels. The European Union needs to evolve to reflect that development. Which means that the role and responsibilities of local and regional authorities and of the European Union are set to increase.

The EU will have to be able to defend and pursue the interests of its citizens at all levels, including regionally and globally. This requires a united Europe that can act as one on the global stage, and defend our interests in a world where none of our Member States alone will be among the big players anymore. We need a united and stronger EU to defend our common interest at the global stage.

What we need is a reformist yet responsible, visionary yet functionalist agenda. We cannot look too much inwards and allow ourselves the luxury of institutional wrangling. That would not help us to address the daily concerns of Europeans. In the end of the day, what matters is that our policies can deliver concrete tangible results that really improve people's lives.

We have much work ahead in the coming years to continue to modernise Europe's economic and social model. Not nostalgically clinging to the status quo, since that would only lead to a permanent economic decline of Europe. Not dismantling the European model, because we believe in the combination of entrepreneurial drive, stability culture and social justice. But instead, genuinely reforming and modernising Europe's economies and societies for the sake of sustainable growth and job creation, and for the sake of future generations of Europeans.

Full speech

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