Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the World Economic Forum met in Switzerland and the World Social Forum in Brazil. I wonder why they met in parallel, and thousands of kilometres apart, rather than together. The European Parliament's debate today, with its joint discussion, gives a good example, as these two subject areas do not absolutely have to be in contradiction to each other. If we want to make use of the opportunities afforded by globalisation and to minimise its risks, we need to be prepared to think in an integrated way rather than score points off each other. This combined approach is in line with the ecologically responsible market economy, which is our model for the political order. We are in favour of the market, but the market has its limits when it comes to the areas of social responsibility and environmental sustainability. This joint debate accords with the strategies we formulated in Lisbon and Barcelona, and with our principle that business creates work and that everything that creates work is society's business. In his closing address, Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the UN, called for a war on poverty. We share the belief that globalisation must go hand in hand with great efforts at fighting poverty. Our resolution therefore lends weight to our endorsement of the goals of the United Nations' millennial declaration of war on poverty and calls on the Commission to submit an annual report to us on what progress has been made worldwide in the war on poverty and what contribution we have made to it. We are drawing closer together. State borders, time zones, distance and size divide us less and less as time goes on. We are becoming ever more dependent on each other. We bear ever greater responsibility for each other in global terms. When others are stricken, we are affected. Globalisation is happening, and what matters is that we make good use of the opportunities with which it presents us and minimise its risks, across both hemispheres. This is where we need Europe to have more clout on the world stage. We need a world economic and social order that is fairer and more just. Issues relating to the global social and economic order are matters of European domestic policy in the same way as European policy is part of national domestic policy. We need Europe to be stronger and more determined. Our continent has an answer to worldwide globalisation – that answer is Europe. We have to do our homework for ourselves. The Lisbon strategy is the right way ahead, but we have to turn from its lofty aims to the clear definition of specific objectives, laying down timetables and responsibilities. On our continent too, a place must be found for our common objectives in all government programmes and work programmes. That is why we emphasise the fact that the potential of the internal market has not yet been exhausted, that unemployment rates are too high and that we have to put all our efforts into reducing them here as much as anywhere else. We call on the Council to require every single Member State to undertake budgetary and economic reform along the lines recommended by the ECOFIN Council. Lisbon and the Internal Market are the tools we need in order to respond to globalisation and to discharge our obligations to the world at large. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE