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Today's agenda includes an item on the drafting, for the June Summit, of a roadmap designed to point the way towards genuine economic and monetary union. In the Thyssen report the European Parliament called both for democratic legitimacy to be strengthened and for the arrangements governing economic and monetary union to incorporate a social pact. Social criteria are no different to budgetary rules: compliance with them must be monitored just as strictly, and breaches of them must be punished just as severely.
The purpose of a social pact of this kind would be to ensure that, alongside budgetary discipline, employment levels and respect for basic social values were the yardsticks used to measure Member States' performance. The European Parliament regards youth employment, high-quality public services, wages which offer people a decent livelihood, access to affordable housing, basic welfare provision and access to basic health services, the protection of fundamental social and employment rights and equal pay and equal rights for equal work as key social criteria. These are issues which ordinary people in Europe care about!
For that reason, I should like to voice once again our very real fear that the debates on Treaty amendments and constitutional conventions, however important they may be, will blind us to the fact that we must use the provisions of the existing Treaties to overcome the current crisis.
In the current situation, do we really have the strength and unity of purpose which would be needed to put the EU on a new legal footing? It would certainly be desirable, but does it make sense to schedule negotiations on a revision of the Treaties for a period during which a Member State is planning to hold a referendum on the issue of whether or not it should leave the EU?
Improvements are needed, of that there is no doubt. In particular, we must improve our cooperation in the area of economic policy. However, almost all the changes required could be made on the basis of the existing Treaties, as the Commission has already outlined in detail in its blueprint. A determined approach is also needed to the issue of the implementation of existing legislation, in particular in the areas of economic policy coordination and financial market regulation.
Today, in that connection, I should like to quote St Francis of Assisi, who said 'start by doing what's necessary, then do what's possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible'.
The Members of the European Parliament have a clear message which you should take with you into today's discussions: don't venture any further down the slippery slope towards intergovernmentalism! The Community method, as embodied in the relationship between the Community institutions, is not only more effective, it is also more democratic.
To be sure, you, as Heads of Government, have direct democratic legitimacy - you were elected by your peoples. But when you come together here in Brussels to take decisions about EU policies, you do so as a European institution. For some years now you have been taking an increasing number of legislative decisions at your level, the level of the Heads of Government, and thus effectively reintroducing the unanimity principle. At the same time, the welter of new terms and acronyms is becoming ever more bewildering, with the result that more and more people are turning away from the EU.
If we want a genuinely democratic European Union, one which has the ability to take effective action and which is accepted by ordinary people, then the Commission must be transformed into a proper European government which is elected by, and whose work is scrutinised by, the European Parliament. One government party has gone as far as to include in its manifesto a proposal that the posts of President of the European Council and President of the Commission should be combined. Even if we are not prepared to grasp that particular nettle we do need to introduce at European level arrangements which people are familiar with from their own countries. Those arrangements are democratic, transparent and readily understandable - they build trust.
Decisions taken behind closed doors, makeshift legal constructs which sit apart from the Treaties, confusing power structures - all these foster mistrust. No wonder people are losing interest.
Europe needs clear and simple structures which ordinary people can identify with and understand. We will win back people's trust when they can understand who does what in the European Union and when they have the feeling that they can make their voices heard. For that reason we need to strengthen parliamentarianism, at national and at European level.
See also President Schulz at the Spring Summit: "You will need to engage in serious negotiations"