Madam President, I would like firstly to congratulate the President, Mr Prodi, both on the White Paper and on his comments here today. It seems to me that the forty pages of this White Paper are forty dense pages, full of reflection and proposals. But I also believe that your comments were splendid, succinct, full of ideas and vision, and I would like to congratulate you on behalf of my group. Furthermore, I believe that your manner of presenting the White Paper has been correct. You have done so modestly, and that is to your credit. The White Paper is a departure point. It is just a text which leads to reflection and now we have to ask our co-citizens to participate in this reflection, to offer ideas and to send projects. I believe that all of us in this Parliament agree on the analysis of the situation, that we all wonder what is happening to the European Union and why our co-citizens sometimes show a lack of confidence. I believe that the White Paper explains this well: the benefits of the European Union are general and they often pass unnoticed; however, the disadvantages are specific. I remember the effect in my country when lorries of strawberries were overturned by French farmers. This always happened at the same time of year, one week, and it was just a very isolated incident. That created enormous anti-European feeling: ‘Why does the European Union not worry about us, the European Union does not care for us’. That ended as a result of the efforts of the European Commission, amongst others. Surely the Spanish, or many of them, do not realise that. I believe that our main problem is that we are European without knowing it and without doubt this White Paper has a good role to play in this pedagogical zeal to explain what Europe is and what the European Union is for. The second idea that I would like to highlight on behalf of my group is that this White Paper stresses the originality of the system which has operated over the last fifty years. Furthermore, it supports the continuation of this system which we call the ‘Community method’, yet nobody questions this. Today I have been very glad to hear President Prodi talk about maintaining the balance between the institutions: this seems to me essential. The Group of the European People’s Party, which has always tenaciously supported the European Commission having a monopoly on the exercise of legislative initiative, believes that it is very positive that that legislative initiative, when it comes about, should count on the participation of many more players: of what we call civil society, of local and regional authorities; above all especially if we do so, as Mr Prodi said, without in any way altering the balance between the institutions or the constitutional status of the Member States. Of course, this Parliament is also going to cooperate in this task of contributing ideas. And it is doing so by means of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs whose rapporteur on this issue will be Mrs Kaufmann, and it is also doing so on all those issues which are eventually going to be combined with the reflection of the Commission which President Prodi called the third reflection, which is going to come together in the debate of the IGC 2004. This White Paper is very important because we are at a moment of the historic constituent process of the European Union, and that process opened with declaration 23 at Nice. I am sure that the presence of Commissioner Barnier is in response to this. Therefore, this will be a further element of this process, which is important, and visionary, and which is necessary when Europe is preparing for the euro, for enlargement and for the debate on what we Europeans want.

Political group: PPE-DE