Speech to the Slovenian Parliament by Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament

Ladies and Gentlemen,

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.

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  in 2050 Europeans will make up just 5.4 % of the world population;

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  in 2050 neither Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom nor any other EU Member States will any longer be a member of the G7;

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  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.

The European Parliament therefore must focus on four objectives:

We must introduce effective bank control and supervision mechanisms.

We must break the vicious cycle between bank debt and sovereign debt through the creation of an effective resolution fund.

We must guarantee more rapid debt relief in the banking sector with a view to ending the credit squeeze at long last and protecting taxpayers by ensuring compliance with the principle of banks rescuing banks.

If this can be achieved, ailing banks will no longer be able to drag down other banks, throw countries into economic difficulties and leave the taxpayers to face the consequences.

The European Parliament is concerned that the proposals of the Council of Ministers fall short of a functioning Banking Union. We have made every effort to reach compromise solutions in the course of the negotiations and will continue to do so. We hope that the Council of Finance Ministers is on the way to finding an answer that will satisfy both the European citizens and the banks. To achieve this, we will need your help.

In many countries, the financial and economic crisis has not only swallowed up enormous sums of money and undermined production targets, but has also deprived us of something infinitely more precious, our confidence in the future.

I understand that people are frustrated with politicians, disappointed in democratic institutions and furious with the banks.

Youth unemployment is a massive problem for Europe. I know that in Slovenia, for example, one-quarter of young jobseekers are unable to find employment.

Young people who are well educated and 'have done everything right’ now find themselves with no prospects, being made to pay for a crisis that was none of their doing.

We, today’s generation of politicians now in office, owe it to these young people to summon up all our reserves of courage, energy and inspiration in order to find the best solutions.

In the EU we have already set to work, having now introduced the Youth Guarantee scheme. However, we still have more, much more, to do.

And together we can do it!

Our top priority must be to create not only jobs but good jobs.

We must at long last end the credit squeeze and give our small and medium-sized undertakings the support they need, since they form the backbone of our economy, guaranteeing growth and providing the most jobs!

These are all policy areas in which the EU can and must deliver.

For this, we do not need an EU super state. I have no desire for a United States of Europe along the lines of the United States of America. Nation states are not one of world history's nine-day wonders but the political repository of French, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, German or Slovenian sentiment. That we wish to remain Slovenes or Germans, for example, is obvious when we consider how much importance we attach to our respective languages and cultures. It also appears unmistakeably on the football field or at the Winter Olympics. Speaking of which, allow me to offer you my heartiest congratulations on an extremely impressive performance in winning eight medals!

Yes, nation states are here to stay and that is a good thing because people need a home, particularly in a country such as Slovenia, which has faced massive upheavals, such as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Ten-Day War and the 1991 referendum on independence, not to mention the plebiscite on EU membership in March 2003 producing a 90% vote in favour!

Slovenia has undergone a number of dramatic changes in a very brief period of time and has, in the space of just a few years, succeeded in forging a pluralistic democracy and government apparatus.

In a country such as yours, national self-determination is understandably of incalculable value and I have always admired the pragmatism of the Slovenes in realising immediately that, in an unpredictable world, this is by no means incompatible with a clear-sighted appreciation of the benefits of belonging to a larger entity such as the EU and that in fact the two go hand in hand.

Furthermore, I do not want a meddlesome EU obsessed with micromanaging. From my experience as mayor, I know that the closer decision making is to grassroots level, the more democratic it becomes and the more satisfactory it turns out to be.

In other words, whatever can be best achieved at local, regional or national level should be undertaken at local, regional or national level respectively.

We need the EU to step in to provide additional security where necessary, because together we are stronger.

We have succeeded in creating a unique social model in Europe.

We enjoy the benefits of a free press, an independent judiciary, healthcare, pension provision, free access to education, opportunities for all, parliamentary democracy, participatory politics, equality before the law and securely anchored civil rights, all this accompanied by the highest social and environmental standards in the world, with no place for child labour and no place for the death penalty.

We are a society with human values at its core and that is the society in which I want to live, the kind of Europe in which I want my children to be able to live.

That is why we need Europe. The European Union may not be perfect in every way but let us work together to improve it and ensure that it offers younger generations the promise of a bright future.

Thank you for your attention.