Mr President, Mr President of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, today at talks in the House, the President of Latvia directed this reproachful remark at us: 'We have been doing our homework!' The question is whether the Heads of State and Government of the European Union have been doing their homework too. This raises a huge question mark at the present time. In Amsterdam, the Heads of State and Government failed their exams, and now they have to go to Nice to resit them. A failed resit has to be regarded as a crisis in any school career, and I fear that another mass failure may well be on the cards. Let me use another metaphor. European unification is a marathon in which we have successfully stayed the course over the past few decades. The stadium is now in sight. Do we have the strength and determination to complete the final lap, or shall we miss the entrance to the stadium because we have lost our bearings? This is the question that has to be asked in Nice, and I hope that we have the strength to emerge from the enlargement process with a robust Union, because enlargement must not weaken the Union. For this reason, the European Parliament believes that two conditions must be fulfilled. The first is that qualified-majority voting must be extended, but this extension must not focus on areas of relatively minor importance. Forty areas can be listed in which voting by qualified majority is to be introduced, areas such as the appointment of members to the Committee of the Regions. I would gladly give up these 40 extensions if we could achieve majority voting in five areas where substantive progress can be made, such as trade, social policy, justice and home affairs, structural policy and taxation, to name the most important. Our appeal to the Heads of State and Government is that each of them should put his playthings into the communal toy box, so that the others will do likewise, rather than each waiting for the others to make the first move and then nothing happening at all. This, quite simply, is the situation in which we have been stuck for months at the Intergovernmental Conference, because none of them are willing to give up their toys. I hope that, at the start of the ministerial meeting of the intergovernmental conference, someone will have the backbone to give up his toys in order to pressurise the others into making a move. Secondly, the democratic deficit must not start to widen again. In Amsterdam, it was decided that qualified-majority voting should always be accompanied by codecision. Any derogation from this rule will fuel the democratic deficit and undermine the progress made in Amsterdam. I hope this will not happen. There are also a few leftovers to be tidied up in the fields of competition policy, monetary union and agricultural policy, so that a right of codecision can be established in these areas too. At the Intergovernmental Conference, we must also strike a fair balance between the large and the small nations. I should like to emphasise that the population of Europe consider themselves to be represented in the European Parliament, and Parliament must reflect this. If the disparity between the large and the small members of the Council becomes too great, we face the risk of a legitimacy crisis within the European Union in a few years' time, because the small countries will no longer feel comfortable in the Council, fearing that they might become unable to defend their own identity. I believe that, if the two conditions, namely the creation of an effective Union and the reduction of the democratic deficit, are not fulfilled, the European Union could be confronted for the first time with a situation in which this European Parliament refuses to ratify a treaty. (Applause from the right and centre)

Political group: PPE-DE